Memory is all that we are,
and all that we are is what
we remember. These days
I often forget why I enter
a room as I enter. I’m forced
to wait on the blurred past
with its dead possibilities
to catch up to my present.
We sit comfortably couched
about the room. We confess
our stories again, shifting
scenes to allow for shapes
which differ, to be polite,
from others in other rooms.
(December 28, 2025)
memory agitates into vision media res: the precise moment of peak self-revulsion, the inaction, the cowardice, the lie inherent in regret— when nothing more could have been done, nor anything now retroactively applied which can act as balm to the shame carried for decades through the day in those quiet moments on the way to work, waiting for the light to turn green, or some phrase, or song on the radio which tumbles memory’s cascade through the spongey canyons to again reconfigure itself into this contiguous present as some other story without static cause
(December 25, 2025)
It has been several decades, at least, since I read Eliot’s Four Quartets from beginning to end in one sitting. But since the poem came up in a conversation a couple of days ago, and Lisa has gone out of town, I read them out loud to myself in one go. It is an amazing work of art: time, faith, God, identity, sense of place, abstract while being incredibly precise in concrete details which fold back into the abstract. The usual allusions to everything in world literature and religion, but so subtle and fast it becomes as if you are reading about Jonah, Arjuna, Charles the 2nd, and many others for the first time. And such a magisterial voice and a musicality which lifts the reader to intellectual heights before they realize what is happening. When, 30 years ago, I read The Quartets for a class on the Modern long poem, Walt Litz, my prof, described it as “philosophical poetry, not philosophy as poetry.” If you haven’t read it, and want something deep, but not as daunting and dark as The Wasteland, then you should read it. It made me think about the first time I heard Beethoven’s Ninth, or Handel’s Messiah all the way through. And if you have read it, then it might be time to look again. I remember reading once that different poets often speak to you differently at different times of your life. The Four Quartets speak differently now than they once did. “My words echo/ thus in your mind.”
(December 16, 2025)
by
People try to talk to me.
I hear, perhaps, half,
then, as they go on, drift,
moved as if by tides.
Alone, most days, slipping
slowly from book to thought,
to roll my tongue through words
plays with incoherence.
There need be notes like stones
left as markers to return;
or bits of marginalia
tossed along the shore
to hint towards an origin,
I can no longer explain.
(October 24, 2025)
The conversation continues along
the old tracks of cliche. Clack-clack he says.
Clack-clack, she responds. And so goes the night,
Another milk run no one remembers.
I worry about what I should forget,
and forget what I should worry about.
In a forest of clear trails and side tracks,
one word completes the regrets of the whole.
It’s easy to get caught in an eddy,
to circle slowly back to past mistakes,
to unravel a gesture’s soft nuance,
to mean more than anyone could entail.
What could he have said? What could she have said?
The words are spoken. The cast’s determined.
(May 31, 2025)
“Conversation is precarious.”
—Anne Carson
near here someone waits
they are there patient and sublime
in their waiting as if purpose
were only an excuse to wake
once more into conversation
especially one decades old
where the edges decayed
softened in the thick of time
become vague ambiguous
easier to misunderstand
to trust the distorted echos
before falling away into silence
like pebbles off cliff walls
fall into a foggy crevasse
(March 18, 2025)
“worn out a way of being”
—-Jim Harrison
1)
Not that they went away,
my meds muted most,
and slowed the pace
to a lachrymose flagellation,
from relentless and revisionist
jump cuts, reshuffled
and reconnected,
in ever new and familiar
kaleidoscopic tropes.
2)
I read once twenty-five percent,
or more, of people have no voices
talking to each other,
no inner voice to sound
the depths of their day.
“How do they think?” my students asked
when I told them. “I wouldn’t know:”
I sighed, “strangely, I guess.”
“How lonely,” one girl said to herself.
3)
Almost four in the morning,
the dogs insist on going out.
I’m tired and insist on telling
myself that I am tired. I want
to make a list of all the things
I’m tired of, finally coming
to a consensus: I’ve worn out
a way of being, a path carved
in repetitive quiet conversations.
(October 7, 2024)
1)
too often,
too eager
to exist,
I interrupt
to take part
outside myself
2)
too often
too impatient
to follow convention,
I stutter,
or stay, too often,
silent
(September 29, 2024)
I want to say something,
so I interrupt their conversation.
What I have to say
is not that smart,
nor insightful,
yet I say it,
because I must.
My words are protection
against my insignificance.
People are polite.
They nod their heads,
feigning interest
as if what I say adds
to the topic.
When I pause,
they pick up
where they were
as if I were dust
in a corner
of an empty room.
(March 31 2024)
I don’t see finishing another book by the end of the year. So here is a list of the books I finished this year. I always add finished because I often stop reading books for various reasons: 1)I forget where I put them, and then when I find them I don’t care anymore; 2) I lose interest; 3) I find the book tiresome, or obvious;4) the book is dreadful; 5) I become distracted and start reading something else. I also add finished as a qualifier, because I sometimes suspect people’s list of books read is more about competition (LOOK, I’ve read a bunch more books than you!) than it is about reading what you want to read. So, here is my list: 2023 books
The Wasteland: a biography of a poem by Matthew Hollis
Black No More by George Schuyler
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World by Elif Shafak
The Needle’s Eye by Fanny Howe
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo
Less by Andrew Sean Green
When We Were Orphans by Kazaa Ishiguro
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
The writing Life by Annie Dillard
The Dance Most of All by Jack Gilbert
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Forget the Alamo by Burrough, Tomlinson, and Stanford
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Finalists by Rae Armantrout
Pierre Reverdy Selected Poems translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Gasoline by Gregory Corso.
Breathing the Water by Denise Levertov
Fully Empowered by Pablo Neruda
Flower Wreath Hill, later poems by Kenneth Rexroth
Four Unposted Letters to Catherine by Laura Riding
The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell
The Now by Albert Goldbarth
Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Poetry as Insurgent Art by Laurence Ferlinghetti
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea
Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Hermetic Definition by H.D.
Singing at the Gates by Jimmy Santiago Baca
I know what you will say—
So, I speak instead to change
the direction of your subject
before you think to speak
Too often I use language
as a shield to deflect
the slashing barrage
of each day’s small talk
I natter through scripts
only I can hear, tumbling
variations into possibilities
from the obscure to the germane
Social cliches constrain
conversation from becoming
too much to hold us together,
and too little to tear us apart
(March 7, 2023)
We drank beer, and
talked about music,
and art, and poetry,
and all the other
inconsequential
moments of life
which make us
more than we are
when on our own.
(August 15, 2022)
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