Bojeski

The book design in gray-white and darker gray

horizontal spaces showcases the cover photograph 

by Gil Ross, softening the poet's eyes, his slight mustache, 

and pale beard. Thin rectangular glasses contrast with 

the wide cable-knit turtle-neck sweater I imagine 

as the color cream disguised behind the noir design.

My copy of his only volume was bought virtually 

from the Montana Family Library, D'Youngville College, 

not stolen as was Lucie Brock-Broido's copy lifted urgently 

from the Carnegie Library on Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh, 

the only book, she declared, that she ever stole, 

promising herself to burrow into this masterpiece and the life 

of Bojeski, having learned from a kingmaker professor who unveiled 

such poems that she and other students would resolve 

on hearing these creations never to leave poetry. 

Bojeski transmits the imagined voice of a flawlessly beautiful young girl

"so important" in life," a marvel of beauty he projects 

the story after her death of the body rubbed with perfumed oil, 

her skin sewn with jewels and sealed away into 

a "painted box" declaring "I will last forever. I am not patient,"

a form of permanence he supposes as her willingness to return home 

to complete her unfinished life, imbued with ephemeral fragility, 

this elegance put to rest elaborately, in her place

of eternal patience that retracts an infinite solitude

as she imagines her unmet groom and a distant tambourine

so distant from Bojeski's Joliet, Illinois, where he lived 

his twenty-seven years fashioning a world available only to the mind 

beyond Midwestern silence, the fragrances of protective flowers 

in the solitude of a Midwestern miniature world of the page, 

"to lie still till the world swims back again."