Light's Ladder

In this extraordinary new collection by distinguished poet Christopher Howell, the opening poem presents us with a spiritual paradox that will echo throughout its pages. The speaker remembers an earlier time of happiness, freedom, and a certain innocence. The poem closes with:

And if he remembers now

he is in love, which is the soul's condition, and alone

because that is how we live.

"How we live" is the book's major inquiry; its illustration, the poems' major achievement. How do we live, in our dailiness, in our loves, our private and global wars? And, in the face of unbearable grief, how can we live?



Keats

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain

of love's distraction, lay dying in his room

on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini

Fountain "filling him like flowers,"

he held his breath like a coin, looked out

into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.

He did not suppose it was fever or the body's

weakness turning the mind. He thought, "England!"

and there he was, secretly, for the rest

of his improvidently short life: up to his neck

in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries

of street venders, perfect

and affectionate as his soul.

For days the snow and statuary sang him so far

beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless

and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow

of his last words to Severn, "Don't be frightened,"

may enter you.

Preface

I

If He Remembers June Light in Oslo

Running

Metamorphosis

Trusting the Beads

Unexpectation

History

Today

Situation 2003

A Party on the Way to Rome

Apacatastasis

If the World Were Glass

The Counterchime

Confession

He Writes to the Soul

1974

II Stories for Braille Calliope

Sometimes at the Braille Calliope

Bird Man Stranded

The Eye Becomes Birds Because of War

The Toad Prince

King's Ex

Zeno

The Thriteenth Interval

Teleology of the Airhose

King of the Butterflies

The Montavilla Reveries

The Fire Elegies

1. Family Values

2. The Double Suicide of Marriage

3. To Build a Fire

4. Storm

5. Arrivals

6. The Angels of Rescue

A Christmas Ode After the Fashion of Michael Hefferman...

Heaven

III

Why the River Is Always Laughing

Galileo

Story Time

All Day at the Brainard Pioneer Cemetery

Backyard Astronomy

Letter

Cole Porter

The Getaway

Keats

Event

Like Rain Descending

The New Orpheus

A Little Blues

Acknowledgments

About the Poet