Meeting Yourself

Rummaging in my stuff recently, I found my first masters’ thesis, the one from 1982. The first sentence was simple enough, the second less so, and, after that, the syntax and language became so muddy I couldn’t trudge through it. I gave up, convinced someone else must have written it, maybe an ancient astronaut or [...]

Haiku Sonnet: After Closing

His job is to sweep beneath tables floating like a floor laid on air. Chairs perched upside down look over his progress as he shepherds a crowd of crumbs in shadow. The manager and his wife dip heads in prayer to love. Before he reaches them, their hands signal goodnight. Keys jingle faintly as they [...]

Laughing Gas

I heard once that levels of nitrous oxide—N2O—are rising nearly one hundred fold in the Arabian Sea. Before that instant, I thought of N2O as laughing gas, the stuff dentists use to anaesthetize patients. I didn’t know nitrous oxide existed in nature, and I soon discovered it doesn’t much. The substance arises—in ways I don’t [...]

Haiku Sonnet: The Word For It

All objects are made yours by use, each one a doll of your affection. At the end of chains pocket watches twist, speaking their one utterance, prayer machines sewing time together and forming sentences.  Which day will words change  into the things they name?  Not today. Bodies float in space, their umbilicals pulled taut, beaming [...]

Carrying Capacity

With school starting Monday, I’m in my last hours of summer, lamenting a list of accomplishments so much shorter than my list of ambitions, regretting unfinished (and unstarted) tasks. I’m not even close to being ready and really shouldn’t be writing this post. But here I am. A smaller version of these blues hits me [...]

Casualties

The kitchen air is fragrant with cream cheese kuchen. One piece missing, its circle still sinks a white table buoyant with sun. She stands, one palm pressed to the window, her mind smoothing memory’s cowlicks, recalling the postmark birthmark on her son’s arm. His room upstairs holds just light. No one rises. Morning discloses scuffs [...]

Excuse me, Mr. Coleridge?

Try as I might to quiet the question, I’m always thinking and writing about the proper place of form in self-expression. Composing a haiku sonnet raises issues, watching a short on YouTube raises issues, trying to follow my daughter’s account of last night’s dream raises issues. And I have only defensive answers. Coleridge believed in [...]

Haiku Sonnet: Azrael

With its parts absent my watch tells time differently. Moments pick moments. My impulses knot according to a logic indiscernible, and earth’s orbit rests and rolls as it pleases. Light has quit. Memory— finally—rules time. Now each juxtaposition is an echo, each circle around this blank face closes on itself at last.

In Memoriam: Liam Rector

I’ve spent the last two hours trying to write something about Liam Rector, who committed suicide last week. A poet and the director of the Bennington Writing Seminar, Liam was my teacher during my final semester at Bennington when I prepared my thesis manuscript and graduate lecture. I’ve struggled, however, with what to say. I [...]

Haiku Sonnet 7: A Summons

Under the same sun, We step into the lake, cold even in August, too cold to stand long. Our vacation will end soon. The sun takes shortcuts across the sky, stays only long enough, and dies at every day’s end. What once prodded us half-heartedly waves us on. Live. Every next step is faith. It [...]