Silence
in speech is what I like in my ear
while other language rushes
to make scenes, prayers, ideologies, thoughts.
It’s hard for me to be around every word
and yet in it—
the luxury of space gets me every time—
the tourist in me seeing the empty
stadium the
space between green and green,
well, that’s entertainment.
Passion in the Scrapbook
Not good hallucinations of the past.
Why is no one smiling?
Ah! The spirit of the era. That must be it— the vagabond
religions, the love of gold, motions without meaning,
but there on the back page, a photo—
a bush made more yellow by sunlight! That must be it.
Grace Cavalieri is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Greatest Hits, 1975–2000 (2002), Pinecrest Rest Haven (1998), and Poems: New and Selected (1994). Her collection What I Would Do for Love: Poems in the Voice of Mary Wollstonecraft (2004) was awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize; Water on the Sun (2006) won the Bordighera Poetry Prize. Other collections include Sounds Like Something I Would Say (2010) and Anna Nicole: Poems (2008). A selection of Cavalieri’s poems, plays, and interviews, Other Voices, Other Lives, was published in 2017. Her awards include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medal, the Columbia Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. She is also the host of the radio program The Poet and the Poem, presented by the Library of Congress through National Public Radio.
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