Poetry |
“October 6, 2016,” “October 30, 2016,” “[unsent draft]” and “March 1, 2017”
“A man I once loved said forgive me each time he committed even the smallest transgression. / He’d drink the last beer in the fridge and say forgive me as he lowered his body to mine on the couch.”
Poetry |
“Radar,” “Poetic Minimalism,” “Dandelion,” “Impressions of the Empiricist David Hume,” “Illumination” & “High-Speed Train”
“When a leaf falls / skyward —// and proceeds impertinently in its ascent — // it’s time to admit / we are talking about a butterfly.”
Essay |
“The Fly in Blake, in Dickinson, in Marmalade”
“It seems precarious when Blake is invoked as a senior member of a dead poets society that insists on a tradition whose ‘coherent wholeness’ is no longer possible …”
Fiction |
“Snug Harbor,” “They roam the bay unloved,” and “A comet blazed across the sky”
“… and when I turn the map over I see that it tells you nothing about coming ashore, and everything about where to drown.”
Poetry |
“Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor,” “What mistakes did you make last time?” “In the syntax of surrender” & “Consider different fading systems”
“Down is a force, a source / of release although dams, aggressively / engineered and financed, work / against this — what’s held inside / is trapped. And harbors a plan / for spectacular escape …”
Essay |
“A More or Less Imperfect World: Reading Merton in Modernity”
“What I long for in this world is an acknowledgment of practice. This is something I am still working on. What, I want to ask people, are you practicing?”
Essay |
“Small Animal Needs”
“Another story: A beautiful young woman smokes a bunch of pot one night and walks one across a four-lane highway with her little girl to the nearest rundown grocery store.”
Poetry |
“On Ghosts”
“Shakespeare’s ghosts suit all / the critics argue. A skeptic, / Catholic, or Protestant / would each leave the Globe / with their idea of ghosts confirmed.”
Poetry |
from “The Ruins of Nostalgia”
“We were wise to flattery, to certainty, to historicity, but we lay down our burdens for all of them. We were wise to ourselves, in every sense. We were wise to hearts, candy or otherwise.”
Poetry |
“Interview With Gertrude Stein” and “Interview With Anne Carson”
What’s the point of loving others? AC: “There is a black planet speeding towards us.” (Glass, Irony and God)
Essay |
“In the Garden of Uncertainty”
“I tried to make peace with the fact that my body still had the upper hand, as there was no way to address whether a cancer cell from the original cluster of cells might have stowed away on a blood vessel bound for a distant port.”
Poetry |
“A Walk with Frank O’Hara”
“… debonair in white flannels, a small notebook / in one pocket, an egg and tomato / sandwich wrapped in wax paper in another.”
Essay |
“The Explosion”
“Right after the explosion, the newspaper interviewed me. So did a lawyer. He was seeking damages on behalf of the victims. The newspaper article reported that I had run into the house, though I had only gone under the carport.”
Poetry |
“Apart”
“… and here a man, his sudden awareness: / duration is patience preserving / presence through the ongoing, the violence.”
Essay |
“Robert Musil & the Crisis of the Artist in Times of Ideological Polarization — the 1920s & 2020s”
“His attempts to bear witness, his notes for articles never published, the speeches he actually dared to give … show Musil struggling mightily under the strained tug of war between reality and possibility, freedom and censorship, fear and bravery.”