MARIE-CLAIRE BANCQUARTbiting through the bunches of my notes
smearing her cheeks with rouge my lips aren’t allowed.
—martin sorrell
I Walk in the Solitude of Books
I walk in the solitude of books:
my heart ices over
with those memories iced over.
The wind pounds on the shutter.
November.
It took a whole life for the cracking of wood to arouse a crucial anticipation.
Beyond the garden
beyond the time before us
there are the fallen husks of chestnuts
the fire of leaves in the fog
the purple windows.
Exactly November.
Everything in its place.
And yet the unknown is nearby
like an anxious bird.
—mary ann caws
Return of Ulysses
Ulysses kills the suitors close to a fragile bowl of milk
which a servant
with breasts henceforth pierced by arrows
was clasping
in its whiteness.
Surprise in the corpses’ eyes.
Surprise in Ulysses’s heart:
that great odyssey for such a homecoming,
a wife barely recognised, a servant butchered in error.