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JOSEPH FASANO

Solstice

Like the Dutchman who hacked out               
             a 2,000-page treatise on the soul

of bees, I was doing my work:  
            Autumn. Winter.  I was trying to love

the story of the composer 
            who carried his frail mother from their burning house

at Wolfsgarten, then stood 
            in a scherzo of blizzard 

until she perished of bitterness for this world.   
            I was trying to hold

the feral face of the possum 
            like the wild boy of Avignon, moving its slow

lips that would not end.  
            I was Leviticus.  I was Revelation.  I was

the child excavated from the battlefield at
            Agincourt, then hanged

a second time, 
            moths in the moonlight of her forearms.  

One night             
             I will whisper it, in toto: how I discovered

a river 
            like a suitor, abandoned

my dead to its vigil.  How obsession
            wore his silk-red 

kimono, his wine-dark 
            mouth at my table. 
 
How I was neither
            the falcon nor falconer,

the singer the singing
            nor song.




13     The Paris-American

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Joseph Fasano is the author of Fugue for Other Hands, due out from Cider Press in January, 2013. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Yale Review, Tin House, The
Southern Review, Boston Review
, and other publications. 
He won the 2008 RATTLEPoetry Prize for "Mahler in New York," and he has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize, the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, as well as a Pushcart Prize nominee.  He teaches at Columbia University, among other institutions.  About Fugue for Other Hands, Jeanne Marie Beaumont has written, "...this book  embodies 'further, deeper, wilder'...it is never timid or tamed, has no easy comfort or uplift to offer but immerses us in the disturbances of living on this mortal earth from start to finish."


  
   Next week's poet:

 Christopher DeWeese
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