Jet Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids […]
Poetry
Duffy Gets the Nod
Carol Duffy (AP/Paul Thomas) This late breaking news is fabulous on so many levels. Congrats to Carol Duffy! This report from Rene Rosechild includes a poem by Duffy that was posted here back in October: The post has been held by William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson but until two days ago, never by a […]
Meditation on Pockets
Pockets Are generally over or around Erogenous zones, they seem to dive In the direction of those Dark places, and indeed It is their nature to be dark Themselves, keeping a kind Of thieves’ kitchen for the things Sequestered from the world For long or little while, The keys, the handkerchiefs, The sad and vagrant […]
The Washed Colors of the Afterlife
A Single Autumn The year my parents died one that summer one that fall three months and three days apart I moved into the house where they had lived their last years it had never been theirs and was still theirs in that way for a while echoes in every room without a sound all […]
Claiming the Poem
I’m running a few weeks behind on my Times Book Review reading, but here’s a piece by Jim Holt from the April 5th edition that rang true. Holt does a compelling job of advocating for memorizing poetry. Imagine that. At a time when so many poems can be accessed online, Holt makes the claim—and I […]
Clear in Hindsight
In the past, when I began to study Zen, it was all a mistake. Wandering through numberless mountains and rivers, I wanted to find something to know. It’s all clear in hindsight. Having learned this, what do I have? Release a crow into the night and it flies flecked with snow. – Dayang Jingxuan Dayang […]
What Breaks Will Break
Homestead in Dakota Territory Wintering Dakota Territory, 1884 Already, winter makes a corpse of things. Snow reshapes what ice has taken. You’ve lost interest in letters. So let sunrise come. Let smoke grow darker by the light of day— what I could spare of you I’ve burned already. The fencepost needs repair. Let sunrise come. […]
Walking at Night Between the Two Deserts
Air Naturally it is night. Under the overturned lute with its One string I am going my way Which has a strange sound. This way the dust, that way the dust. I listen to both sides But I keep right on. I remember the leaves sitting in judgment And then winter. I remember the rain […]
In Love with the One to Whom Every That Belongs
Open Window, Collioure, by Matisse What Was Told, That What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest. What was told the cypress that made it strong and straight, what was whispered the jasmine so it is what it is, whatever made sugarcane sweet, whatever was […]
Inwardness, Seamus Style
Seamus Heaney. He’s a legend, at home and abroad. The first time I traveled through Ireland 10 years ago, I was incredulous to find his books for sale at the grocery check out counter and at the petrol station. While we get People magazine shoved in our faces, the Irish get volumes of Heaney. But […]