James A. Winn     

    Musical selection of the month:           
J. S. Bach, Sonata in E-flat Major           
Siciliano , with David Kopp,           
piano, from a concert at the Newton           
Free Library on February 17, 2009.           

Background image: Anne Killigrew, Venus Adorned by the Graces, c. 1684             

Poem of the month:

Romanesque

Morning: smells of serious cooking float in the street.
Onions give up the ghost, flesh sizzles, a metal spoon
clinks on a dish. We’ve lived here for eight hundred years,
we’re still hungry. Ancient mosses nibble the stones.
We found such fierce ways to love.
A demon for each, carved in limestone, squirms in the church:
Despair, Luxury—they tangle in vines, ride lions, gape.
Adepts at pronging pitchforks into the gut.
You saw light leak from my eyes. I saw you turn.
On the tympanum, Christ barely balances
in his almond chafing dish, Pentecostal fire
hurls out to the Apostles left and right,
they’re microwaved. They were about to eat.
In the market, I bought lettuces as frilled,
scalloped, unfurled, and rainbow-hued
as rococo chapels—Batavia, Tarantelle,
Reine des Glaces—and the sun touched each sweet leaf
till it trembled and spoke in tongues.

—Rosanna Warren

2 June 2009