Category: lit theory

A Part Apart

A story’s comfort
comes in retelling.
The pattern laid out
like a blue quilt;
each square tightly
stitched to someone
else’s contribution,
someone’s scraps.
It’s taken time
to listen close,
to follow a thread
from knot to knot;
until I, too, am
woven whole.

(July 9, 2016)

Read For This: a Lecture

Past words pirouette off the page,
like apparitions at their stations,
to reanimate an old thought
into a different mind’s age.
A pithy phrase or sensuous line
catches the ear in a whisper,
slows the thought to a clarion
even this reader might hear.
To know what happens, look
at what remained: the tattered book,
the cited scrap, one has saved
to write through the bookish dark.
What drives us to our age
resembles what drove us before:
to slip past the smoke and hate,
to sway in the dancer’s slightest gait.

(July 4, 2014)