Everything

Secrets of the Garden of a Vacant House Seen in a Dream (translated by Hiroaki Sato) Things planted in the garden of a vacant house are _______pine trees and such loquat trees___peach trees___black pine trees___sasanquas _______cherries___and such prosperous leafy trees___branches of leafy trees that _______spread around as well under the leaves of those swarming branches [...]

In Harvard Square, The Coop and The Harvard Bookstore loom large. The former is essentially a Barnes & Noble dressed as Harvard’s bookstore, paraphernalia and special interest sections galore. The latter is a little more of a heavyweight. Situated on Massachusetts Avenue in the heart of the square (a mere two blocks from The Coop, [...]

Most of the work I do in the garden is a sort of re-reading. I might stare at a spot for a good ten minutes, then go to another place and stare at that same spot again until either satisfaction, or displeasure, or further bafflement causes me to place a few rocks, or to plant [...]

Psalm for Third Base Fingers have their own prayers, often crossed, but also bunched in pockets for warmth or comfort: there, amidst the fumble-scratch of eager hands, there where verbs take root: touch, trace, fist. There in the back pew of a filled church with a skirt tented just-so, a boy’s fingertips graze inside, the [...]

What do animals dream? Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial? Do they struggle to catch in their slumber what is too slippery for the fingers of day? Are there subtle nocturnal intimations to illuminate their undreaming hours? Are they haunted by specters of regret do they visit [...]

So I’m reading, and very much enjoying Ray Hammond’s Poetic Amusement, his masters thesis on the influence of po’biz amid writing programs on American poetry. When I read, I interact with a text, start scribbling my own argument for or against, maybe write a didactic sonnet, or trounce about my house looking for other books [...]

An encounter it would have been gripping to see: the 1875 reunion, in Stuttgart, of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, at the conclusion of the older poet’s two-year imprisonment in Belgium. (He had been convicted for firing on his lover and giving him a flesh wound in the wrist.) Verlaine told his friends that, as [...]