September 21, 2017
This Rosh Hashanah, We Throw the Door Open
To go home, leave crumbs. When the wood circles you back here instead, let the lost and the impossible ripen in you, ripen and go. “What is Growing […]
July 30, 2017
Dear Future People
how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. —”Water at Night,” Marianne Boruch —or did you get past us, just far […]
July 10, 2017
On the Steps of a Midnight Church: for Jasminne Mendez
Dear Jasminne, I’ve been thinking of you since you returned from your trip to the Dominican Republic, and about silence and poetry and the act of writing, and about what […]
June 18, 2017
A Letter to My Father on Father’s Day
—and there was a young ram who’d climb to the top of the mountain with the rest of his family, and they were wild and belonged to no one […]
March 16, 2017
On Derrick Austin
Last night here at the college, we hosted Derrick Austin, who gave a marvelous reading and conducted one of the best Q&A sessions I’ve ever seen. He encouraged our students […]
August 8, 2012
Secret Credos of the Godless
Notice how scientists are always talking about laws. Laws with a capital L, no less. Einstein’s Laws, Poiseuille’s Law, Hooke’s Law, Fourier’s Law, etc., etc. This endless law-giving reveals something […]
June 12, 2012
Reason Not the Need
I do not need religion. I can plug that hole with anything: family, literature, music, medicine. I can distract myself and go along and never look up and die quite […]