More on: time

Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful the Beloved (both from Copper Canyon). Long known for his condensed and crafted style, in his recent work, Orr demonstrates a shift toward the personal lyric at its most stripped-down,…

i In the eyes of Dürer’s Saint Jerome, desert inhabits the dark flecks of his downward gaze. It harrowed him. He came back clean as picked bone. Chalcis of sunlight, and sand— only in the eyes can days be counted, days of muscle wasting, in which desire dwindled to the body’s dry growl. He’s written…

Soon, soon enough, all of this, this lived life, this navy-blue couch, your confetti-splashed, yellow-striped skirt spread across it, your lovely legs beneath the skirt, the joyous aroma of toast in the toaster, a ball bouncing and the cry of boys, all of it will assume the stilted look of my childhood photographs. 1958, ’59.…

THEY WILL ALL LEAVE, first my brother-in-law, who is frank about his tastes, and then the others, borne away on several tides of pretext—the bathroom, pots on the stove, the freshening of drinks—from which none return. Now it’s just me watching, lying belly down on the bed where I used to sleep with my wife.…

How many minutes does it take a gut-shot buck to helter-skelter through scree and lose the hunter? How many days for turkey vultures to convert death into gliding? How many years till some schlub hiker like me stumbles upon the remains? There it lay— a tableau in bleached bone, flight and collapse converted into sleep.…

On an island in the disputed region of the Yellow Sea, blooms of smoke from the shelling of the garrison weave into one bloom, one force of nature so thick, they say, you cannot see your hands. The planet, we know, tilts on its axis like a man contemplating a problem, spun toward the horizon…

Understand the light, then, and recognize it ————————–—Corpus Hermeticum ——————–Memory is a kind of accomplishment ————————William Carlos Williams I Birdsong on the book page, birdsong on the brown rug; fanfare of birdsong above the radio orchestra; birdsong in shafted light of the wooden blinds. In one moment I heard them—by which I mean they’d all…

My corkscrew willow’s the last each autumn to loose its slender fingers of dried gold; first each spring to clutch my heart with, overnight, a thousand fisted buds. Today, the last thing I would wish is another emblem of grit and continuance; still, my willow models a fierce, therapeutic rage, lashing the glass in a…

  ONE WILL ROSS NOVEL was a bestseller in the sixties, another earned six figures after its advance and brought in a few hundred each year, but hardly anybody read his twenty-some books anymore, and when he was invited to the odd conference in South Dakota or South Carolina, attendees were surprised he was alive and…

—Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame. Black holes dissipate to God knows where, —Yet everything we’ve said and done remains —Like these lilies floating in this garden pool. Each name We’ve said, each paper lantern strung, each cross we’ll bear —In Time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame —Yet floats forever here.…