Voyages V by Hart Crane Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though castTogether in one merciless white blade—The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. —As if too brittle or too clear to touch!The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.One frozen trackless smile……
Saturday morning and Starbucks is abuzz. Yesterday afternoon we attended an open house to celebrate the graduation of my wife’s brother’s son’s daughter from high school. The graduate was radiant as she greeted well wishers just inside the foyer of the great room. We were not sure who would be present at the event. …
Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, or a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patiently crafted, the more naïve – the more authoritative the photograph is likely to be….
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity… nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse and to pierce intellectual depths and give all subjects their articulations are…
I am the last person to mention Holy Week. Holy Week is the commemoration of the apogee of the Christian mythos: Jesus’ triumphant arrival in Jerusalem, and events that follow. Think of the hoopla surrounding the winner of ‘American Idol.’ As consequence of the word of mouth rumor of his outlandish teaching (love your…
We live in through and by our stories do we not? Who could I possibly be apart from the stories that I tell myself? What could I become unless my imagination is sparked by the stories which you have told me? The ultimate form of human association is marked by vulnerability, – such that…
“Moments are torn from us,” Seneca wrote. “The whole future lies in uncertainty.” Fortune behaves as she pleases, he wrote. As we’ve talked about before, life comes at you fast. It doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t reason, it doesn’t care about your wants or needs—it just is. All we can do is accept the uncertainty…
Revisionary by Robert Pinsky The globe on a tilted axis means The News. As the icon spins the angle seems to shift. Science has found ancestral Neanderthals. We have a bit of their blood. They painted caves Better than sapiens, as we named ourselves. History has found the Jews who fought for Hitler. Thousands…
American history has been about guns. Ask any indigenous American. Ask any Republican for that matter… Yesterday I watched an old Western movie entitled, Last Train From Gun Hill, staring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. The plot as you can guess is about outlaws and gun-play. The “good guy,” the one wearing the star…
Early morning, I left the house, the sun was a fiery ball at the tree line across a frozen river. The vehicle temperature gauge read +2 degrees. A song was playing on the local radio station. I am certain the poets, lyricists, playwrights, are the ones who show us the metaphors, perform the scenes…
