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The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
—Agha Shahid Ali
From The Atlantic
Seven Autumns of Mourning in NEwtown
Seven years ago, in Newtown, Connecticut, Halloween was canceled. We were working to dig ourselves out of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, finding detours through a maze of roads closed by downed trees, keeping kids busy through a full week of “storm day” school closings, and improvising meals on hot plates as we waited for full power to return.
Newtown normally hosts Halloween along its lovely downtown thoroughfare of colonial-era meetinghouses, churches, and historic homes, all radiating from “the flagpole,” the landmark that pulls us all together, the center of things. The homeowners go all out decorating their facades, and welcome all comers. The Episcopal church hosts a pumpkin-carving contest that runs the week before, and on Halloween night, scores of carved jack-o’-lanterns light up the corner of Main Street and Church Hill Road.
But in 2012, all of this was canceled.
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From The Daily Beast
Love and loneliness in an America Defined by Mass Shootings
Last Saturday morning from my house in Newtown, I engaged in what has become a harrowing ritual: having heard of another mass shooting, I located in my memory those I love who might be affected, and I attempted to contact those persons to make sure they are unharmed. Because of where I live I have been the harried recipient of such inquiries, the first in a long line of rituals associated with residency in a town whose name has become associated with the act of a single mass murderer with a gun.
As news broke of the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, it was two former students of mine, now married, whose wedding I attended a few years ago. I remembered a note I’d just received—a Halloween card to my two sons whom the pair had babysat during their college years in Charleston, where we lived then—with their new Pittsburgh return address. Both poets, at their wedding they had recited under the chuppah a poem they’d first come across in my class. It contains the lines—referring to two horses who have been “grazing all day, alone”—“They love each other./There is no loneliness like theirs.”
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from Poetry
Is my small written
How many ways God said to shoot through something
example near and shot through with light least of all light
and near what I’m personal God said with how I use my
shots my water my streambeds I’m thinking about shot
through with shallow a kind of light reserved for bobcats
crossing stream in secret how I use the growls my creatures
make some who growl even in dreams some who come snake-
bit rather than shot some who drown in water I thought
safe and the matter of letting things small me that starts
when I give each a body to touch drink and move with
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from The Kenyon Review
September 7, 2001
By then what had we already
given away? What was still ours?
Be realistic—at this hour ten years ago
you were still alive, but barely:
when you couldn’t speak
I touched your toes
and maybe you dreamed
my hands were made of fire. I was lucky—
all those “last” conversations,
crosswords we filled with your answers,
the hospital tuck, Borneo, the short word
for supine. And you were dead
before the world began its pale turning,
the black ops, drones by starlight,
caves meant for hiding. Yesterday
I saw a man holding straw flowers
in the median of the road—
in him something had been made
to spin.
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from The American Poetry Review
Was What Came Over You
—after Emily Dickinson
Was what came over you anything like this
a cold wind on the neck an ocean of pigment
I ask because I have no real purchase on any of it
I’m just beginning to find
filament-like the shapes of things and their masks
painful to remove but also undergirded with color
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from Image
On Brotherhood and crucifixion
Black Cross, New Mexico, 1929 (Georgia O’Keeffe)
Twin of the one in my mind, this cross is uneven—blooms like the trunk of a heavy woman, its underside bright as sunset, and under it, O’Keeffe’s hills—like looking at two miles of gray elephants, she said once—a sort of bed where no cross lies down. The sky’s a kind of vanishing of the arcs, blue enough for anyone who wants it. The thin sunset trapped forever under the heavy arms of the cross, sky before sunset free and foreshortened above it. Cross and shadow of cross made one.
Photograph of a Crucifixion, 1888 (Charles Fletcher Lummis)
And there we stood facing each other, the crucified and I, says Lummis of following the penitentes brotherhood outside San Mateo, New Mexico, to the spot chosen to crucify one of their own on Good Friday. This after their self-flagellations all through Lent. He reports that the man sobbed like a child to be roped rather than nailed to the cross. In the picture the man’s face is covered in black cloth, his body in white, and two brothers steady the cross upright, hold the ropes as a sail is held to wind. Taut.
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from KR Conversations
An interview series on Kenyon review online
What have you learned about the writing process in the last five years?
That I need it in ways I could never have appreciated earlier in my life, and that it’s very important that I show up to do the work they require.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Love. Love of persons and places and the existence of same. Love of language and paint and mica flecks and yellow leaves. And so on.
Of all the things you could be doing, why do you write?
Writing helps me move toward (though never arrive at) the person I would like to be. I don’t know of anything else that could help me get to that person, that person who knows how to love. I do know how silly this sounds, by the way, but you asked!
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from Blackbird
Looking for god (its big machine)
I looked for god in the knot of the wood I looked in the garnet
heap and hungry I hungered under the tongue of the rough
where ice formed in the river’s oxbow came I up cold in
moving current looked and looked where branch met wound
and wound its undoing as if to move from one place to the
other were to bloom outward from looking I forgot to look
in the swirls and eddies boredom made of me its pasture and
grass and at my boys’ sandy knees I looked or
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