by David Solway (April 2026)
A Book of Hours
–
Sometimes I know you are the ceremony I am part of,
that every day will have its fare of love
evenly distributed across the hours
the way a good housewife spreads the butter on the bread
so there is everywhere enough
and no empty patches or spotty lumps.
And sometimes I will doubt all consecrations
and every small felicity of every blessed day
as sly temptations of the ever-present fiend
to lead me to the flaw in all that is lovely and consoling
as if, when reading, one mistakes
a tiny spider for the page number
until it begins to move.
That’s when I fear what went before
and dread that it may come again.
That’s when I resent a retrospective infidelity
as if your past belonged to me no less than your present and your future,
as if I were already there long before you knew me.
I suppose that means I love you timelessly,
not only sometimes.
I suppose that means I will let the spider live
as I read the story we are writing in this book of ours,
then look up from the page where all is done and said
to watch you spread the butter on the bread.
–
–
–
Tourists Under Heaven
–
I cannot say if I’m against or if I’m for it:
bringing the heavens down to merely glancing table talk
where words move in a roundelay as if in orbit.
We stow the dishes and take our evening walk.
Yet let it be a vision, love, we hold between us:
the race around the skytrack of every fiery chariot
and, in particular, the resonance dance of Venus
that sets above the Sheraton and rises over the Marriott.
–
Table of Contents
David Solway’s latest books are Profoundly Superficial: Observations on a Net-Zero Culture and Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam, and the West. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.
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