Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at a...
Sit, unplanted, with your back to a tree, or to your . If sorrow drowns the hour, let yourself , each hurt recalled, the heart a of old wounds. If startled by joy, let yourself Light dims, the air cools your . Unclear , what it is you’re - each mon...
When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend t...
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without...
At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animal...
In the aftermath of the attacks on the United States – that included chaotic overall of airline security – and the exploding tensions in Nepal, friends thought it ill-advised for me to board a flight to Kathmandu. Yet my existence at home felt so...
It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the wo...
One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares th...
Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity—civilization’s backbone—that tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore...
What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can’t penetrate. …people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The prob...
