A Bolero in Havana
A Busload of Banjo Players
All Gratitude Being Mine
Asleep
Dead Letter Drop
Holy Water
Ice Fishing
Narcissus Brings Me Flowers
Nocturne without Counterexample
Providence
Smoking Magnum, 1991
Summer, in My Early Twenties
There Are More Storm Clouds than What You See Outside Your Window
We Are V
What Barren Means
Dead Letter Drop
JJ Mitchell
St. Mary—newly recruited patron saint
to dead letter drops—inherits an assembly
of agents and spies. Sundays bring reports
of spycraft and foreign men—bearded,
barely shadows. Some feign muteness,
others inexplicable gestures, a cleverly-
disguised brush-pass, or speak in strange tongues,
stamping the church grounds in a Cold War cadence
where they buried hollow spikes filled
with the cigarette-thin papers of state secrets.
Still, She blesses these missals of espionage,
granting them their confessions as double agents,
forgiving them their doublespeak.
For the others, the regularly devout,
there must have been moments
of near miracles: the disappearance
of coins—some microfilm-loaded—offered
at the feet of St. Francis of Assisi,
the fragments of chalked Cyrillic notation
and the ever-expanding assembly of pious men.
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to dead letter drops—inherits an assembly
of agents and spies. Sundays bring reports
of spycraft and foreign men—bearded,
barely shadows. Some feign muteness,
others inexplicable gestures, a cleverly-
disguised brush-pass, or speak in strange tongues,
stamping the church grounds in a Cold War cadence
where they buried hollow spikes filled
with the cigarette-thin papers of state secrets.
Still, She blesses these missals of espionage,
granting them their confessions as double agents,
forgiving them their doublespeak.
For the others, the regularly devout,
there must have been moments
of near miracles: the disappearance
of coins—some microfilm-loaded—offered
at the feet of St. Francis of Assisi,
the fragments of chalked Cyrillic notation
and the ever-expanding assembly of pious men.