Of all the kings of Portugal we’ve seen the last but one today— well, not quite him but all his rooms, his bathtub and his queen’s bidet. Inside this castle in three styles, each one foretelling Disneyland, his bust preserves a fine moustache— but no one jumps to its command. Geoff Page

Read More

They are full of incomplete dreams hedges which have grown too high fallen fences gone to seed dandelion garden tennis courts a mineral not vegetable mangle rusting in peace, its gutta percha roller white hard as the sheets it pressed— somewhere beyond the wild-haired china pears there is the cap of the well backed up […]

Read More

At festivals, of course, you hear it, this clapping for an absentee— the young director in L.A. already on a higher fee. In aviation, it’s less common. A pilot’s way with physics’ laws in France will earn from passengers a grateful round of stunned applause. Geoff Page

Read More

Once there was a vineyard here in green and ordered rows. Now the bleaching grasses bend and nothing fruitful grows except a self-sown lemon tree with leprous, aching boughs, heavy with the bitter fruit come of a daze of flowers. Strange, ugly and unpromising fruit, a crop of warted noses, nothing you present to view […]

Read More

All those heroes high on horseback fill the European squares. Each country’s had its yard of sunshine— now it’s yours and now it’s theirs. Generals, ambitious kings re-drew the logic of their maps— as valets, not much more forgotten, watched them while they took their naps. Geoff Page

Read More

Russian novels are full of people gathering them, while wishing they were in the city. Barbara Fisher

Read More

Only certain cities have it. A street plan may suggest the mood. It’s in the fluency of subways and in the flourish of the food. A string of kings has been and gone with sometimes a caudillo, too, but through it all they’ve always known we’re not the many but the few. Geoff Page

Read More

his arms fold over each other left palm firm against the lower right arm right fingers curve loosely across the biceps golden hairs glisten on tanned skin arms that have dug holes for trees posts fences muscles strengthened against soil wire wood fingers that have guided root tendrils, trickled soil over them, patted the earth […]

Read More

We’ve done it once again, mon Dieu! Yet again we failed to see that we were still in France, alas, and cappuccino had one “p”. The girl who smiled her savoir faire as we enquired “Italiano?” then scorched the milk with quite a flourish would get no work beside the Arno. Ja Ja Si Si […]

Read More

I took a faddish nonsense And wove a certain charm With words designed to scintillate, postulate, disarm. My lines were splendid nothings, Mere heady repartee: My ink pools weren’t for you, you see but formed to flatter me. Brianna Heseltine

Read More