(Amy Clampitt, for you) Casual. Flitting skin off cucumbers over a wide metal bowl, catcher for the harvest from the summer market, that cosmos of virtue — jug bands, frailed banjos, picked mandolins, tomatoes as a toddler sees them, mitts of stars — I feel a comet trail of shiver where my sternum is, that…
Encompassed with domestic conspiracy, military sedition, and civil war, they trembled on the edge of precipices in which, after a longer or shorter term of anxiety, they were inevitably lost. EDWARD GIBBON, THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE In a widely noted coincidence, the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of…
One morning in tenth grade, my Bible teacher started class by holding up a copy of The New York Times. He was the one we called Little Adler, to distinguish him from his older, taller brother, Big Adler, who also taught at the school. Little Adler was a good guy, at a place that was…
“You are the music/ While the music lasts.” Whatever these words mean in Eliot’s Four Quartets, they have often been given new meaning in dance, and nowhere more so than in the solos choreographed by Merce Cunningham. He is the choreographer whose most radical, controversial, and profound contribution to choreography was to separate it from…
I. All time indeterminate now so this might be late or early and hardly a day in itself. Call it infernal nevertheless with my first move a descent into air thick with lamentation. I mean tension in the clock as it works towards sunrise and fear becomes natural law. * Starlings in the tree opposite…
After the hurricane my father walked beside me in the woodland broken down; he’d known it as a child and now his wife, my mother, on the far side of the wall we came to in the end, the churchyard wall, had left him to complete his time alone. Wave after breaking wave of shredded…
American linden also American lime of the family Basswood (tiliaceae un- pronounceable virtually for this layman) but mine opposite keeps that quiet and presents facts as they appear – being a handsome street-shade tree with elephant bark in hard scaly ridges and russet twigs wandering into green until, when flowering, it fills with bees giving…
To the memory of Christopher Nelson Lasch No image comes as quickly to mind when thinking about the ancient Stoics than that of stone-cold busts from antiquity. Frozen in time, the taut and grim facial muscles secret away any feelings that might have roiled the hearts buried deep beneath the weighted folds of drapery. To…
In the halcyon days of the British welfare state, even the poor had the opportunity to go to university. Anyone who had been offered a “place” could apply to the local Education Authority for support — not to cover the fees (there were none), but to meet the expenses of living. But when I took…
On A Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People A Brother and Sister By Gerard Manley Hopkins O I admire and sorrow! The heart’s eye grieves Discovering you, dark tramplers, tyrant years. A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves, And beauty’s dearest veriest vein is tears. Happy the father, mother of these! Too fast:…
Unfinished dares avoiding rules override Avernus. Were you wrong about everything to say anything? Plausible laws insufficient to our lives are blowback For the myth of liberty. Depeopled palace trumpets Silent where they were once wild for slaughter calls. Sons and daughters commandeer our mercy for grief Discerning: Who would harm a stranger harms me….
Phantom intelligence of the soul knows touch echoes Trace gestures prone to outcompose their originals — Springs and veils marvel at their sudden plainness, Nincompoops with tongs abandon the whole shebang. My stupefaction remains wholly blunt and untamed, That once familiar summer will ripen and destroy all Backward glances aimed at divining an elusive theme,…
