April 2013
9 posts
"Jane Jacobs' Radical Legacy" and Us
“Cities, she believed, should be untidy, complex and full of surprises. Good cities encourage social interaction at the street level. They are pedestrian friendly. They favor walking, biking and public transit over cars. They get people talking to each other. Residential buildings should be low-rise and should have stoops and porches. Sidewalks and parks should have benches. Streets should be...
The Poems in My Pocket
Usually, I am a daily participant in National Poetry Month. But this year since March I have had my first case of pneumonia, which is hanging on despite my efforts to be well. I have been inside. But, looking out my window I can see it is beautiful in Northern California. Yesterday, I sat in the backyard of the house where I am staying, listening to the fountain, soaking up the sun, tilting my...
“Boston is a tough and resilient town. So are its people. I’m supremely...”
– President Barack Obama. 15 April 2013
Two Poems for Paula
“I was never sure that monogamy would overtake me. But it did when I met Paula.” —W. S. Merwin in conversation with Bill Moyers. 26 June 2009.
LATE SPRING
Coming into the high room again after years after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds after losses and feet on stairs after looking and mistakes and forgetting turning there thinking to find no one except those I knew...
Leaving a Presence. RIP Roger Ebert.
“So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.” —Roger Ebert. (The final lines of his 2 April 2013 “leave of presence” statement.)
Rest in peace, Roger Ebert. You passionately continued to plan and live each day of your life until you died. The example of your life reminds me to live my own with...
To the Book
Go on then in your own time this is as far as I will take you I am leaving your words with you as though they had been yours all the time of course you are not finished how can you be finished when the morning begins again or the moon rises even the words are not finished though they may claim to be never mind I will not be listening when they say how you should be different in...
Barking
The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.
—Jim Harrison. Poetry. September 2008.
March 2013
6 posts
Easter Morning
On Easter morning all over America the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.
We’re not supposed to have “peasants” but there are tens of millions of them frying potatoes on Easter morning, cheap and delicious with catsup.
If Jesus were here this morning he might be eating fried potatoes with my friend who has a ‘51 Dodge and a ‘72 Pontiac.
When his kids ask why they don’t have a...
"When did you stop dancing?"
“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a shaman or medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence? Where we have stopped dancing, singing, being...
Coming To My Senses
“While we talk, the world, with all of its terrible troubles, rolls on. There will never be enough money. There will never be enough time. There will always be more work to do. But every now and then we find a small extra thing, a necessary sweetness, that keeps us from believing we know everything and all the news is bad. The wild card that leads to one of those hairpin turns in a life...
In the Library
for Octavio
There’s a book called “A Dictionary of Angels.” No one has opened it in fifty years, I know, because when I did, The covers creaked, the pages Crumbled. There I discovered The angels were once as plentiful As species of flies. The sky at dusk Used to be thick with them. You had to wave both arms Just to keep them away. Now the sun is shining Through the...
The Chance
may favor obscure brainy aptitudes in you and a love of the past so blind you would venture, always securing permission, into the back library stacks, without food or water because you have a mission: to find yourself, in the regulated light, holding a volume in your hands as you yourself might like to be held. Mostly your life will be voices and images. Information. You may go a long...
December 2012
2 posts
The Station Agent: Thoughts for Dan Davenport
Because we have a shared love for the film The Station Agent—you told me you watched it again last night—I tried to write a response to you in 140 characters, but I failed. I have to leave for San Francisco now, but I couldn’t go without trying to determine what it is about the film that moves me. Based on what you said, here’s what I think, (without too much time to think):
Maybe the three...
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me...
October 2012
2 posts
A Confession
My Lord, I loved strawberry jam And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body. Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil, Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves. So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit Have visited such a man? Many others Were justly called, and trustworthy. Who would have trusted me? For they saw How I empty glasses, throw myself on food, And glance greedily at the...
A Song On the End of the World
On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net. Happy porpoises jump in the sea, By the rainspout young sparrows are playing And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas, A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn, Vegetable peddlers shout in the street And a...
August 2012
2 posts
Real power
What’s perfectly whole seems flawed, but you can use it forever. What’s perfectly full seems empty, but you can’t use it up. True straightness looks crooked. Great skill looks clumsy. Real eloquence seems to stammer. To be comfortable in the cold, keep moving; to be comfortable in the heat, hold still; to be comfortable in the world, stay calm and clear. —Ursula K. Le...
July 2012
6 posts
The Storm
We lay in our bed as in a tomb awakened by thunder to the dark in which our house was one with night, and then light came as if the black roof of the world had cracked open, as if the night of all time had broken, and out our window we glimpsed the world birthwet and shining, as even the sun at noon had never made it shine. —Wendell Berry. Entries. (Pantheon Books, 1994.)
Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black...
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives — tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like? Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you? Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy, to let you in! Never to lie down on the...
Raymond Carver's Late Fragment in the N+7 Machine
The N+7 machine replaces each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. I’ve used the machine to generate 15 alternative texts for Raymond Carver’s poem Late Fragment. To put your own text in the N+7 machine, use this link: http://www.spoonbill.org/h+7/
Hat tip: Stan Carey.
N+0
Late Fragment And did you get what what you wanted from this life, even so? I...
June 2012
1 post
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
February 2012
1 post
“…and there is really no such thing as youth, there is only luck, and the...”
– Edna O’Brien, Down by the River
(Quoted in Cheryl Strayed’s Torch.)
December 2011
1 post
TWO HANGOVERS, James Wright (1963)
NUMBER ONE
I slouch in bed.
Beyond the streaked trees of my window,
All groves are bare.
Locusts and poplars change to unmarried women
Sorting slate from anthracite
Between railroad ties:
The yellow-bearded winter of the depression
Is still alive somewhere, an old man
Counting his collection of bottle caps
In a tarpaper shack under the cold trees of my grave.
I still feel half drunk,...
August 2010
1 post
