He sits in a creased maroon leather recliner with his feet flat on the rug. The book is slender, nearly weightless in his hands. The door of his tiny study is closed. He reads by the light of a lamp which sits on a dark oak desk now cluttered with a few opened books, face down.
“Walter Kaplan Reads John Hersey’s Hiroshima, March 1947,” by Peter Orner Read More »
“George Platt Lynes photographed a naked man, curled / into a snailshell’s infinite regress, and I want / to follow suit, my body a starfish, my skin seized / with a Polaroid purchased on a serious / whim: may I become Lincoln Kirstein or Monroe Wheeler, / wide palms full of fortune, or the sailor / my master of the pick-up / stick picked up and froze in a print / hid in the Kinsey Institute until too recently!”
“Poem for George Platt Lynes,” by Wayne Koestenbaum Read More »
It never ceased to amaze him when grown women, women with husbands and children, acted like they were vestal virgins. His own sisters pulled that one on him all the time, or at least they had when they were still actually treating him like a human being, before he’d had to sell his house and business in Cape Cod and move in with friends.
“Larry in Love,” by Jennifer Moses Read More »
“I’ve said that I have a love-hate relationship with the institute of higher learning, but I’m not opposed to scholarship. A poet is a scholar. I really believe that you should know not just your own age, but other ages.”
“On cliffs above a beach / luxuriant in low tide after storms / littered with driftwood hurled and piled and / humanly arranged in fantastic / installations and beyond”
“Five O’Clock, January 2003,” by Adrienne Rich Read More »
“This minute my small toes are shrinking / of their own accord. I have no say / whatsoever. Blame it on buoyancy, / without which, rambunctious and passive / as a beachball on the breakers, I / never would have bobbled here. The wild green groans / by which I lived before language / now gesture and have at me / only in dreams.”
“In the Beginning,” by Alice Fulton Read More »
“Do you remember our first / January at Eagle Pond, / the coldest in a century? / It dropped to thirty-eight below— / with no furnace, no storm / windows or insulation. / We sat reading or writing / in our two big chairs, either / side of the Glenwood, / and made love on the floor / with the stove open and roaring. / You were twenty-eight. / If someone had told us then / you would die in nineteen years, / would it have sounded / like almost enough time?”
“Letter in the New Year,” by Donald Hall Read More »
Eye, a stone become blood, / late from the eye of God, / plummets bird-like on the riverbed. / Does it pierce the light or create it? What does it expect / in its falling–from its falling? Perhaps / it sees something, searches for something in sleep among the / flowers, / disturbed by its arrival, poor river-flowers, rust-colored umbels / under a dream-rain that foresees the future.
“December Dawn” by Piero Bigongiari Read More »
The objects in the garden, though, / are of a different order. / Remember them. / The white bricks will sustain you / when everything else seems meaningless; / the gardening tools will take you further / than any ideology; / the flag will stand between you and despair.
“Winter Nihilism,” by Tom Luhrmann Read More »
Tangled against the river the red-gray thump of the feet of deer in the half-frozen mud and the sear of dry branches torn from the living, a yellow-orange strip of barkless wood on the trunk and the tender wet where the branch was torn crystallizing in the cold, and trees like a mesh of black oil.
“Hill,” by Margaret Reges Read More »
