Another favorite of mine that has the virtue of being short enough for a lazy guy to type out:
Variations
Family faces modulate
like variations on a theme,
so that in chordal passages
the decades shift without a seam,
the living echoing the dead
to dress themselves in borrowed grace.
I like to find my father's look
safe in my son's unwounded face.
Such grave harmonics lend us back
the only paradise we know:
an idle game with time, but still
not bad, as resurrections go.
**
The first six lines are merely superb, but the next two lines crank things up, in my opinion, especially L8 and "unwounded." And the final stanza both justifies and belies the "nicey nice" theory of Rhina's poetry, and I think is typical of the sort of thing you find in Rhina's poems, i.e., an optimism that isn't founded on denial of what makes pessimists pessimists.
|