The boy came to a clearing on the far side of the forest. An abandoned piano sat in the dead grass. It was out of tune, but that was fine—he hardly knew the difference. At first, he played some notes just to hear them, nothing in particular. But soon he found himself playing the curve […]
1. One crow is good luck. Two crows, bad. Ladybug, ladybug: your house caught fire. One petal: he loves you. One petal: loves you not. Here is the body: stiff as a stick. Here is the feather: now you float. She’s looking sick: she’s dying, dead. One petal left: you’re dying, you’re dead. One crow: […]
All around us, society is being used to tell itself a story. Know what it doesn’t say? Doesn’t say precisely how this one brick got here, how it got to be part of this walkway, only one of its faces visible. Doesn’t say how this brick shines with wind. You’re beautiful. One thing I’m not […]
at sunrise I say light shut up reset the dashboard clock while swerving a travel mug rolling in the passenger footwell that was not, it turns out, spill-proof boulder in the rearview, like some molecular rushing outran its invasive historic wearing away pitted weed against parasite and hollowed out my placeless worry left my initials […]
When I stared into the alpenglow When I dared to drink the water and water was nil When silence was a flock of sheep, and a path a line broke my concentration Planes lifted above our heads when it was easy to manage the remote and was easy I touched the base of a sycamore […]
We Who Saw Everything is a vast mnemonic for the event of our speaking of the secret, the mysterious, the dead.
A poet who urges us to hold dear to all of our experience: that which was, that which is, and that which, someday, will no longer be.
“I work it,” [Armantrout] writes in the title poem, “until sweetness // rises / of itself.” And we are all made wiser by it.
Agnes Martin isn’t painting any scene. Her grids portion out forms of emptiness. And so she gives to us a picture of our deepest philosophic condition. How do I find meaning in nothingness? I make it.
The persistent species of poem known as the “self-portrait”—hardy, it would seem, as the Pacific eucalyptus, as enduring as the horseshoe crab—has drawn its lifeblood since its inception from a certain vein of irony that has managed to endow the species with more than narcissistic interest. One of its earliest specimens, Rilke’s “Self-Portrait, 1906,” frames […]