January 2009
54 posts
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by...
From the corners where the hill turns from the sea and goes into the secrecy and damp air of forbidden things, I stand disinterestedly examining the instruments and the pattern of my fate. It is a slow motion process of the guillotine in action, and I see plainly that no miracle can avert the imminent deaths. I see the time, regarding equably the appearance, but I am as detached as the...
Phone Call by Tony Hoagland
Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight overexaggeration,
an immoderate description of the person
who at the moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.
What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what...
Alcohol by Franz Wright
You do look a little ill.
But we can do something about that, now.
Can’t we.
The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.
Do you hear me.
You aren’t all alone.
And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair …
I was always waiting, always here.
Know...
Many Are Called by Mariko Nagai
Underneath this city, there is another city, one more modern, more recent in its origin. Here, in these dark tunnels where pomegranates fall, all these thoughts fly around like moths, lured by light, by sweet smell of decay, trapping themselves by their own free choice in the confined space of their making: It can’t already be June, it can’t already be Monday, that’s what they say, that’s what...
http://brandon-alien-fine.blogspot.com/
I am at the airport. I am walking down the terminal. I am on a moving walkway. Exercise bike on an airport walkway. Funny. No, stupid. I’m moving. I am timing myself so the sole of my right shoe meets the part of the walkway where the belt ends and the floor begins. It happens and it feels satisfying. I do that every time. I am still walking. It smells like an airport. I have gotten through...
Carolina Ghost Woods by Judy Jordan
A crow calls and the sunset smears into question that swing with the cow’s hoof, reflect in fire, and wait under the wing with the thin lips of death. Apple peel curls, silver yawn of doors, the driven day’s reek, all swell and shrink in equal breaths and tomorrow never comes. Not to that world where the peacock fans its eyes and...
On the Necessity of Longing by Mikael de Lara Co
Let me tell you about longing.
Let me presume that I have something
new to say about it, that this room,
naked, its walls pining for clocks,
has something new to say
about absence. Somewhere
the crunch of an apple, fading
sunflowers on a quilt, a window
looking out to a landscape
with a single tree. And you
sitting under it. Let go,
said you to me in a dream,
but by the time the wind...
Yesterday by W.S. Merwin
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my...
Philip Roth
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as...
Southern Photography V
by Rob Amberg
Why do I write? It’s not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness. - Jonathon Safran Foer
Southern Photography IV
By http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkelso/ I’ve stalked his flickr for over a year. He almost gives me the courage to take my camera with me everywhere. But I don’t.
Southern Photography III
By William Eggleston, my hero