More on: life

Long after the sun falls into the sea and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet and the air gets soaked in blackness, long after clouds hover above like boulders and stars crawl up and fill the sky, long after bodies tangle dance and falter and fatigue blows in and bends them and…

I’m not dead so what do I know. It’s a box of bone I’m in. I work the crash site, push glass bits to the ditch with a broom. A swift hit of spring stuns me, but what’s that. My soul’s not cracked in half for its gold yet. It might be bone in there,…

Love at its start and at its finish is not a sentiment ————–but in your arrival a restless fury, eye of cyclones, the dream of a fossilized gaze smashed under amber arrangement of stars in the air and on your face— each step a last judgment. Sentiments change, but not the struggle between the life…

Knowing life grinds us, And dust Is what we’ll become. Sensing, likewise, That the moral Of our story Has to do With being mortal. Yet love grounds us. And the beloved Grows in us: We are her slow cocoon. And the poem is a door; The song, a little window. § Bowed by a ceaseless…

ONE SUMMER at the lake house, I forgot my swimming suit and found one of my grandmother’s—an old, plastic mold of a suit, perhaps unworn for twenty years—hanging like a replica of her younger body in the upstairs cedar closet. The suit smelled green and sweet, like the lake. When I pulled it onto my…

Hold up your palms to the darkness little one; be pierced with light. Come here for what, for irony and progeny, short years of rising up and passing on? As if there were an end to transience, as if it could ever pass for shelter or resting place. Reason is lost upon such reasonableness when…

IN JULY OF 2014 I went to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Utah desert, about two hours by car from Salt Lake City. Massive, remote, and seemingly useless, Spiral Jetty has the feel of a lost work—one so far out of sight as to be out of mind:  most of us don’t even…

DON’T FORGET YOUR TRANSFER,” my grandmother said. From 1989, she said this to me for ten years. It took two buses to get from the West Side, where I studied and lived, to the East Side, where she had lived her entire life, first on its lower end and now, in her eighties, its upper…