My fronts were beyond ambush, my bastions cleanly surrendered. An afternoon of slow textures—moss patch in the turret, a moth with spring in its fur, and none to scale the oceaning view. Is it umblemished or healed? (A schooner then, a shoal.) They came at night: the youngest sang madrigals, the oldest sewed buttons on a no-name garment. For breakfast, I dressed like a soldier and all the glassware complied, right down to the last icicle. My fronts were quietest in summer, cleverest in suede. They come at night, it was said. What is imaginable is foregone. Look there, it was said—at the mead hall, at vespers, such mild faces at the stake—that's how the spinnakers glow.
34 The Paris-American
Timothy O'Keefe is the author of The Goodbye Town, winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize. His poems and lyric essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Seneca Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Athens, Georgia, where he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Piedmont College
