LEN KRISAK’s two most recent books are Magpie (original verse from Measure Press) and a complete verse translation of Dante’s Inferno, from Routledge. With work in the Hudson, Sewanee, and Southwest Reviews, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Frost Prizes, and a four-time champion on Jeopardy! A 3.6 pickleball player, he hopes to die a 4.0.

QUASI-EKPHRASTIC

Impastoed on the ceiling of the day,

Van Ruisdael’s clouds—and Constable’s—contend.

The war-torn firmament will not take sides;

Great cumuli must see it to the end,

Where their brute forces mean no other way:

They’re on their own, as cloud with cloud collides,

Smashing gun barrel blue against lead grey.

Two sky-scapes that have power to hurt, and may

Do some in combat, threaten us below

As well, where we live out our lives as though

This world meant either castles, long laid waste

And stabbing still at some scant scrap of blue,

Or hay-wain folk, who scorn unseemly haste

In reaping . . .  and in all that they must do.

CUCHULAIN MANQUÉ

—after a phrase stolen from Marie Ponsot

I run into the sea—no time to wade—

To snag a ball the combers carried out.

It is a warring water I invade.

You hug the safe shore; I can hear you shout

Your fear above the rollers’ roar. Invading

The invading breakers breaking in—

Their ravenous undertow, white edges braiding—

I plunge ahead. There is a game to win,

To take back what the water hasn’t earned:

The prize I play for. Rip tide wants me down.

Still, there where I have somehow never learned

The prudence needed if I’m not to drown,

The surge, though it’s an asymmetric fight,

Relents. I race back shore-ward, saved, but shaken

By mindless forces of unstinting might

That almost snared the prize they could have taken.

HIS MAGPIE SPEAKS

Across this white-scape in the morning light,

I scan the snow. There’s nothing here to eat

But shadows, blue and pink devouring white.

Where sun was, drifts have buried all the wheat.

No scuttling prey betrays a chance of meat,

And everything is far too blinding-bright.

Packed clumps of flakes weigh down the black-limbed trees,

Arthritic branches rhyming with my back.

Dead beauty: that is all this magpie sees,

Roosting atop my canted, crippled gate.

In frozen silence, I know only lack.

Sitting for Monet, how long must I wait?