Fanny Howe - Second Childhood

They are the extreme realization of one aspect of human personality

that tends towards lack of possession and solitude.

There was a hole in the roof of the Pantheon where

we were told

that the snow fell through onto the relics of Catherine of Siena

the mystic and onto the porphyry.

A man in Rome told me that a monkey climbed down a wall

holding an infant in his arms and in remembrance

there is a statue of the Madonna

on the very rooftop where he began his descent.

For you, what is happiness?

Black tiles and slant

of ribbed clouds.

A child’s rainbow

with a house under it.

Clothes in the washer

clapping all night.

Thanks as ever to the editors of Graywolf Press and to the staff and atmosphere of the Vermont Studio Center and to the kind people of Civitella Ranieri. For help along the way, my thanks to Rae Armantrout, Christian Wiman, William Corbett, Carolyn Forché, Isaac Slater, Richard Kearney, Elizabeth Robinson, Linda Norton, Carmine Cerone, Xandra Bingley, Lynn Christoffers, and to the exemplary life of Joeritta de Almeida.

I would like to thank the editors of the following publications that published my poems and the poems of so many others:

American Poet, The Baffler, Consequence, The Economy, Epiphany, Fact-Simile, Fire (UK), Golden Handcuffs, The Harvard Review, The Lamb (Song Cave chapbook), New Orleans Review, Pataphysics, Paul Revere, Plume, Poetry, The Straddler, Talisman, The Volta , and Water~Stone Review.

Fanny Howeis the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including most recently Come and See, The Lyrics , and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. She received the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement, and she has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. She lives in New England.