May 2013
1 post
The Land of Beginning Again
by Louisa Fletcher
I wish that there were some wonderful place In the Land of Beginning Again. Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches And all of our poor selfish grief Could be dropped like a shabby old coat at the door and never put on again. I wish we could come on it all unaware, Like the hunter who finds a lost trail; And I wish that the one whom our...
April 2013
3 posts
The Ponds
by Mary Oliver Every year the lilies are so perfect I can hardly believe their lapped light crowding the black, mid-summer ponds. Nobody could count all of them- the muskrats swimming among the pads and the grasses can reach out their muscular arms and touch only so many, they are that rife and wild. But what in this world is perfect? I bend closer and see how this one is clearly lopsided- and...
Messenger
by Mary Oliver My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and...
March 2013
2 posts
Every Day
by Tom Clark
Awake the mind’s hopeless so At a quarter to six I rise And run 2 or 3 miles in The pristine air of a dark And windy winter morning With a light rain falling And no sound but the pad Of my sneakers on the asphalt And the calls of the owls in The cypress trees on Mesa Road And when I get back you’re Still asleep under the warm covers Because love is here to stay...
Roll the Dice
by Charles Bukowski
if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start.
if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.
go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
...
February 2013
2 posts
Great Plains
by Bruce Willard
I could drive for days without fear of outrunning these patchwork clouds, bridge lines of cumulus this way or that towards the horizon, midway between one place and another, standing up to the administrations of wind. I like a destination which pulls true, deliberate, but at great distance. Like I like the slow, imperceptible progress of knowing but not knowing how far...
January 2013
3 posts
The Frogs After Dark
By Robert Bly
I am so much in love with mournful music That I don’t bother to look for violinists. The aging peepers satisfy me for hours. The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet. The flute is always glad to repeat the same note. The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion. Bears are often piled up close to each other. In caves of bears, it’s just one hump After another, and there...
Breakage
by Mary Oliver
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It’s like a schoolhouse
of little...
November 2012
8 posts
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do is...
Selecting A Reader
by Ted Kooser First, I would have her be beautiful, and walking carefully up on my poetry at the loneliest moment of an afternoon, her hair still damp at the neck from washing it. She should be wearing a raincoat, an old one, dirty from not having money enough for the cleaners. She will take out her glasses, and there in the bookstore, she will thumb over my poems, then put the book back up on...
Perhaps the World Ends Here
By Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men...
Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself,
by Barbara Crooker
like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking, flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek across the sky made me think about my life, the places of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling, the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place. Hope is borne on wings. Look...
Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness
Every year we have been witness to it: how the world descends into a rich mash, in order that it may resume. And therefore who would cry out
to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing, as we must, how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be? I don’t say it’s easy, but what else will do
if the love one claims to have...
vote: Middle English (Scots), from Latin votum...
”It all makes sense now. Gay marriage and marijuana legalized in the same day. Leviticus 20:30: “if a man lays with another man he should be stoned.” We’ve just been interpreting it wrong all these years.”
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of...”
– The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.asp...
don’t count your chickens before they’ve all gone to roost, she would say, and remind me that it’s not cold that kills hens but draft itself. her voice is all i hear now. as if she were my mother, or what a mother could be if she weren’t predisposed to farming and solitude. three hens died that spring and she made me bury them behind the fence in the neighbor’s pasture where all i could do to...
October 2012
2 posts
“Two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos. Spiritually the jugs...”
– John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
A Letter in October, by Ted Kooser
Dawn comes later and later now,
and I, who only a month ago
could sit with coffee every morning
watching the light walk down the hill
to the edge of the pond and place
a doe there, shyly drinking,
then see the light step out upon
the water, sowing reflections
to either side—a garden
of trees that grew as if by magic—
now see no more than my face,
mirrored by darkness, pale...
July 2012
1 post
“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept...”
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
June 2012
2 posts
One Train May Hide Another, by Kenneth Koch
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)
In a poem, one line may hide another line, As at a crossing, one train may hide another train. That is, if you are waiting to cross The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read Wait until you have read the next line— Then it is safe to go on reading. In a family one sister may conceal another,...
“Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath. For something to be...”
– Anne Lamott
May 2012
1 post
“The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose the other ages...”
– Madeleine L’Engle
April 2012
4 posts
56, by Philip Schultz
56 Why? This is everyone’s favorite question. No one ever says: Because our bags are always packed and we hear footsteps on the stairs. Because the dark feels unwashed and incomplete and Maimonides said, “When the Messiah comes war will end, God’s blessings will be on all men.” Because we have a God who never dies and never comes and it’s three in the morning and...
San Francisco Remembered
by Philip Schultz
In summer the polleny light bounces off the white buildings & you can see their spines & nerves & where the joints knot. You’ve never seen such polleny light. The whole city shining & the women wearing dresses so thin you could see their wing-tipped hips & their tall silvery legs alone can knock your eye out. But this...
4/23/12
It was a combination of things, I know Just for if the cocktail hadn’t been so deadly, each pill so difficult to swallow you wouldn’t be recovering for five years now.
It was a combination of things I know the threats and deaths and suicides —the rape, the rape was yet another suicide of sorts a binge of blame berating your brain for pulling the proverbial trigger to your own...
Places I Have Heard the Ocean by Faith Shearin In a cat’s throat, in a shell I hold to my ear — though I’m told this is the sound of my own blood. I have heard the ocean in the city: cars against the beach of our street. Or in the subway, waiting for a train … that carries me like a current. In my bed: place of high and low tide or in my daughter’s skates, rolling over the...
March 2012
4 posts
“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There...”
– Mary Oliver
“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and...”
– Paul Valery
A Cold Rain the Day Before Spring
by Stuart Kestenbaum
From heaven it falls on the gray pitted ice that has been here since December. In the gutter rivulets erode piles of dirt and road salt into small countries and the morning is so dark, in school teachers turn on fluorescent lights and everyone comes in smelling of damp wool. From heaven it falls, just the opposite of prayer, which I send...
The Same Cold
By Stephen Dunn
In Minnesota the serious cold arrived like no cold I’d previously experienced, an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity that always took me by surprise. On blizzard nights with wires down or in the dead-battery dawn the cold made good neighbors of us all, made us moral because we might need something moral in return, no hitchhiker left on the road, not even some frozen...
February 2012
3 posts
2/7/12
the moon is everything-you-ever-wanted-in-a-chocolate-chip-cookie good tonight. bright and big and melting the sky around it into a blue green deep enough that you will never see the bottom of the bucket. and the craters! the craters. just enough of them in all of the right places and you can’t find a bad bite. no, you will never find a bad bite because tonight, tonight the moon shines...
1/31/2012 (in haiku)
I am reading, yet merely to see the book closed— yet, I am reading.
January 2012
4 posts
1/29/2012
I love seeing older men waddling out of flower shops on no particular days with bouquets proud and trying. It doesn’t matter if they can’t pay their phone bills and their wives want bread when all they ever get is bourbon and scratch tickets or the anniversary present is a day late. The unwieldy grace, the gentle way they hold the bouquets with an awkward harnessing of strength and...
To Marina
By Kenneth Koch So many convolutions and not enough simplicity! When I had you to write to it Was different. The quiet, dry Z Leaped up to the front of the alphabet. You sit, stilling your spoons With one hand; you move them with the other. Radio says, “God is a postmaster.” You said, Zis is lawflee. And in the heat Of writing to you I wrote simply. I thought These are the best things...
1/2/12 (and 1/3/12, 1/4/12)
There are ways in which I’d like to make you mine.
Grasp my hands over your hands Squeeze your fists into mine so that the imprints of your knuckles mould to my palms
so that I can say that I know the back of your hand like the back of mine.
I want to meld your body into mine, let it seep melt like wax and settle into my creases,
then we’ll hold each other tight compressing the air...
December 2011
2 posts
Youth, by W.S. Merwin
Youth Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for or what to call you I think I did not even know I was looking how would I have known you when I saw you as I did time after time when you appeared to me as you did naked offering yourself entirely at that moment and you let me breathe you touch you taste you knowing no more than I did and only when I began to...
September 2011
3 posts
July 2011
3 posts
1 tag
picture book →
click through to read an explanation of the photos below, courtesy of the lovely andrew forsthoefel.
June 2011
3 posts
“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator....”
