Nee Nej 2, from a new series of paintings I worked on this winter I’ve posted this poem here already, several years ago. It resurfaced in me this morning and it feels like a perfect fit for the mood of my mind and spirit, heavy with the events of the last week. But that undeniable […]
Poetry
Emptiness is What Can’t Be Emptied Any More
Wolgang Laib and Milkstone The Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art is like the pocket-sized Shinto shrines that can be found all over Tokyo—an oasis of calm in a complicated and complexifying urban landscape. I have been a member since it opened in 2004 and spend time there on almost every trip to New York. The […]
Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
Petroglyph at Boca Negra Canyon, Petroglyph National Monument, Albuquerque New Mexico Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it. What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on […]
A Landscape of One’s Own
The landscape in Carson, New Mexico Landscape And Soul Though we should not speak about the soul, that is, about things we don’t know, I’m sure mine sleeps the day long, waiting to be jolted, even jilted awake, preferably by joy, but sadness also comes by surprise, and the soul sings its songs. And because […]
Maureen Doallas: Neruda’s Memoirs
Ode to Compassion When you are old, re-spin me your beginnings from their Greek and Irish coordinates, unplot straight lines of ancient made-up histories, upend the stakes of claims in bindings of your mother’s mother’s mother’s womb cut and spilling life into care. When you are grey, recall me to the look of the father […]
Many Hands and Feet
A Map to the Next World In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky. My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens. For the soul […]
The Perfect, Stone-Hard Beauty
The Poet with His Face in His Hands You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need anymore of that sound. So if you’re going to do it and can’t stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t hold it in, at least go by yourself across the […]
Pointing
I’m short on words these day. Sometimes language goes flat for me when I need to hibernate or retreat from everyone and everything. Sometimes it happens when the center of gravity in my life becomes extremely image-based. Sometimes it is a sign of a nascent percolation deep inside, that odd sense that something is showing […]
A New Nowhere
Voyager We’ve packed our bags, we’re set to fly no one knows where, the maps won’t do. We’re crossing the ocean’s nihilistic blue with an unborn infant’s opal eye. It has the clarity of earth and sky seen from a spacecraft, once removed, as through an amniotic lens, that groove- lessness of space, the last […]
Longing, And Adieu
“In Kyoto …” In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto. –Bashō Translated by Jane Hirshfield This wonderful short poem feels like an appropriate adieu to 2010. The collage above is by Susana Jacobson and dates from our days of sharing a loft on the Lower East Side, on Henry Street at Rutgers, so […]