April 2010
1 post
Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ Triple... →
September 2009
1 post
the courage to begin... again
I forgot how little you can control the Story. You can control what you read, who you try to imitate, you can choose your subject—but you cannot control the Story as it emerges into itself.
I forgot that uncanny feeling. The Story will take you unaware, it will manifest itself in the margins and then crop out the body of the text; it will eat into your pages and lead you further and further away...
May 2009
2 posts
“Why is it that music
At its most beautiful
Opens a wound in us
An ache a...”
– “Music” by Anne Porter from Living Things: Collected Poems. © Steerforth Press, 2006. Listen to the rest of the poem…
March 2009
1 post
February 2009
18 posts
For you, today.
At the end of February finding myself in a field, I saw them there, across the way at the edge of the forest, those wild turkeys shining in the noonday sun, black and bulbous like cannonballs. At first I thought they were a mirage - the wind was so strong that day it hurt my eyes to look - but they looked pleased and proud. And then I noticed the robins, not far away, hopping across the turf as...
When a poem finally comes
I know there must have been a reason for all those damn mornings blinking in the light and trying to contemplate existence before breakfast (holding a pen over the blank page, wordless to tears, hearing too much or too little and gathering nothing to say).
Rosie-the-bulldog poses outside the café window, unchained and waiting for her master; Korean War Veterans sit at tables with girls of eighty...
Swimming Surf Drive
In the morning the sea is nearly white swallowed by sky interrupted by the vineyard I swim propelled by gasps and exhalations my limbs tighten with cold fighting seaweed with my feet blinking against salt Right elbows bend towards the line, imperceptible on which whole ships teeter and disappear Reaching forward to pull myself across the horizon gathering fistfuls of day, hand over hand ...
“If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his...”
– Simone Weil
a valentine's day reminder
love does not make God out of not god.
love can only find its way through forgiveness.
the tenseness and anxiety and gripped fingers we hold the phone with need to learn both of those things.
[c]
“Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and...”
– Thomas Merton
“How fine to have a radio
and beautiful music playing
while I sit at rest in...”
– Listen! by Wendell Berry
Upon hearing birdsong in the parking lot
(Late January)
And then the sun starts to be warm again; the wind bears no hostility; there are birds in the blue blue sky; and even though its not yet February there’s a chance of light as you drive home and light—orange—across the rooftops, when you rise. You don’t need as much coffee now that winter has broken—even the slightest bit—and you know that...
“I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a...”
– Adam Zagajewski
[from some time ago]
The geometry of keys splayed on a table,
tossed without care:
pig-piled and suffocated, cold on granite,
exposed and left open to critics.
The contingency and happenstance of crumbs on a plate:
some crushed under the sudden and meteoric gravity
of a coffee mug, stained around the rim
and elsewhere
with stories to tell that we’d rather wash away
and not deal with the specificity and...
The unity
(of dinner lingering on my tongue,
the soft equilibrium of salt and greens and couscous;
of the clock ticking faithfully and the radio wandering,
slow and resolute,
casually determined like a walk in February by dusklight,
straight arms and pocketed hands,
important breaths and hurried steps;
of the lamp light’s warmth and the plants leaves,
quivering above the...