IN MY HANDS, Failure Is Golden

by Stephen Petroff

She spoke only while wearing a mask that kept her eyes hidden.

“Archilochus was killed by a man named Crow.”

She spoke into her hands.

“Snorri Sturluson was murdered in his own cellar.”

The player of the double pipes sits motionless
in a hexagon of sunlight.

Upon a time, there lived and there was a young woman
came to my house once a week, to practice playing
her cello, never to make melodies, but to make, by
experimentation, the most womanly/afterlife
cello-moans and oo-noises. On the first floor, the
woman sawed beautifully at her strings, while I
mixed colors on the second floor, and in all that season
our eyes never met.

In my work, I often begin with a fragment.
Nearby, I place a segment. From the holdings
Of my Imagination, I introduce a figment.
At the last, I establish it all in pigment.

Keep yourself glad, for the sake of the living.
Somehow, shyness outlasts modesty.

The flight of an arrow out of sight is the life story of an
Adjustment in poetics.

Severin the painter shares simultaneity with the poet Keats,
shared earth, a version of Eternity, comparable to a band of
yellow pollen encircling, encircling an evaporated mud puddle.

Within the next decade, English speaking children
will be retrained in the use of the word “alas.”