Desert “We have to be in a desert, for he whom we must love is absent.” –Simone Weil Early morning and the mist, saturated with light, obscures the disappearing powerlines. A damp obscurity but a desert nonetheless: birds that fly into it lose their bodies and survive as the songs of birds, the tallest locust […]
Poetry
Dorothea Tanning: With Our Souls in Our Laps
Dorothea Tanning, painter and poet Evening He told us, with the years, you will come To love the world. And we sat there with our souls in our laps, And comforted them. –Dorothea Tanning Tanning is that rare being who embodies gifts in the poetic domain as well as the visual. A woman with a […]
Turn to the Open Sea and Let Go
Coastline south of San Francisco, March 2008 Security Tomorrow will have an island. Before night I always find it. Then on to the next island. These places hidden in the day separate and come forward if you beckon. But you have to know they are there before they exist. Some time there will be a […]
No Asylum of One’s Own Making
Sometimes Picasso nails it (like he does in this drawing) I Sing the Body Reclining I sing the body reclining I sing the throwing back of self I sing the cushioned head The fallen arm The lolling breast I sing the body reclining As an indolent continent I sing the body reclining I sing the […]
Donald Hall: Lust is Grief
Donald Hall is a poet whose life and work I have written about many times before. His new memoir, Unpacking the Boxes, was reviewed by Peter Stevenson in the New York Times on Sunday. This book follows his poignant memoir about life with poet Jane Kenyon, The Best Day the Worst Day, as well as […]
Thumbing Through the Dreams
Two of the five poems that appeared on the New York Times op ed page on Wednesday, November 5, the first day of this new chapter in US history: When the Fog When the fog burnt off this morning Outsize JumboTron screens were hanging off the clouds, Scores of them, huge, acres and acres of […]
Legacies and Other Mysteries
Double Wedding Ring Quilt When they exchanged wedding rings did they know it was only the start of sorting through work baskets of “why” and “what it all means,” a ragbag of eye-strain and piece work? Now, seventy eight and seventy five, they hold the quilt between them as you snap their photograph. It scalloped […]
Living in Trees
The Soul We know we’re not allowed to use your name. We know you’re inexpressible, anemic, frail, and suspect for mysterious offenses as a child. We know that you are not allowed to live now in music or in trees at sunset. We know—or at least we have been told— that you do not exist […]
Mahmoud Darwish
While I was in India last August, the beloved Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died in a Houston hospital after complications from heart surgery. Darwish published over 20 volumes of poetry and prose about his life as a Palestinian exile. His is a singular, extraordinary voice. Darwish’s poem, “Under Siege,” is a long poem, full of […]
Not Tonight
A Dreaming Week Not tonight, I’m dreaming in the heart of the honeyed dark in a boat of a bed in the attic room in a house on the edge of the park where the wind in the big old trees creaks like an ark. Not tomorrow, I’m dreaming till dusk turns into dawn – […]