

Pablo to the rescue
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics ?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?'
I’ll tell you all the news. From 'I'm explaining a few things' by Pablo Neruda What good is poetry in times like these? When I wrote my thesis, a million years ago, our starting point was World War I. The size of the war and the sudden industrialization of violence had a profound impact on arti


Marchness
To what can our life on earth be likened?
To a flock of geese,
alighting on the snow.
Sometimes leaving a trace of their passage From 'Remembrance' by Su Shi It was kind of a March week. The sun was out and from inside the world looked light and warm, with spring only a breath away. But once you went outside, you discovered the cold hadn't lost its teeth. It's the doubleness of March: the tulips start growing in the garden but the trees are still leafless. And the bird


Down the rabbit hole
The people I’m looking for—I don’t know where they are.
I don’t know the color of their clothing. From across the park
I see the dark windows of my apartment.
Spring has arrived.
Let me not despair. From 'Song for the Festival' by Gretchen Marquette A strange thing happens when someone dies. You're thrown together with a bunch of people you're more or less familiar with. Together you travel down the rabbit hole until you reach a narrow kind of reality. Suddenly, conversa


The letting go
to live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go Mary Oliver - In Blackwater Woods This is not the poem I had wanted to write about this week. I had thought to use a Djuna Barnes poem and talk about "wildness" versus "home". Or maybe go feministic and post a Glück poem about people being pigs. Things turned out diffe