-
Yo, man…I’m feeling this
We here at the Nass are great lovers of literature and, if we do say so ourselves, the latest in a long line of great participators in the epic, Wilsonian tradition of the precept. We love few things more than a lively precept involving a close, thoughtful reading of a poem and an exhilarating discussion…
-
Muldoon, Between the Tropics
To read good poetry is to pull a Band-Aid off a wound. I heard someone say that once. Not a big wound, maybe just a paper-cut, where the skin puffs pink and new. When we remove the covering we return to our trauma, and the act is pleasurable, despite the shock. Paul Muldoon’s Horse Latitudes…
-
The Burning of Las Fallas
We met at a nightclub called Doblón on March 11, fewer than 12 hours after an international terrorist organization bombed four train stations in Madrid. That afternoon we had each joined thousands of Spanish protestors in the plazas with white-painted palms raising their hands in uproar and then silence, chanting and then falling to their…
-
Visit to Menninger Clinic
I’m angry for my brother’s television set with its lumpy men. He is supposed to be excited for my visit. He likes his rehab friends, two of them play chess under the ping pong table, feet sticking out arbitrarily. I hand him a bag with a cd and a book in it. The attendant asks…
-
Sonnet 34
Amore e Mona Lagia e Guido ed io Possiam be ringraziare un Ser costui Che n’ha partiti, sapete da cui? Nol vo’ contrar per averlo in oblio. Poi questi tre più non v’hanno disìo; Ch’eran serventi di tal guisa in lui, Che veramente più di lor non fui, Immaginando ch’elli fosse Iddio. Sia ringraziato Amor,…
-
The Gates of Life
A French damsel and I decided to take a train To New York to see the Gates and be at play. You were late to the Dinky and had to book It to meet me by the stop to pause, smoke, and spring Off the platform—covered in Bohemian clothes, your petite frame We set off…
-
Breakfast-time
At dawn she sneaks blood oranges From the grange- Land, and the seeded pulp and the climbing (where the farmers’ fence is Rough) have painted orange- Red her picking arm. For several Mornings now I’ve seen her range Her pickings in a row—the smallest smaller Than a hummingbird, the largest larger than the clock’s face…
-
Your father’s faults
We were sixteen when they evacuated the gymnasium in the middle of the English exam (anonymous bomb threat, year after Columbine). I was writing on Roethke – not the poem we’d read in class and most everyone agreed told the story of an abusive father and forgiving son, but one about a root cellar in…
-
Another Way of Missing You
In the French, tu me manques – you are missing to me. You are missing to me, to my body, to my arms which starve on air, to my eyes which dream up the shape of you in everything. You are missing to my fingertips and the roots of my hair, to my toes, to…
-
Grace
Sig loves me. He’s sitting at the counter, eating a bagel right now, but I know he’s thinking about me. Today, like every Sunday, he sits all day here in this café where I work. A man across the coffee shop is pulling his knit cap down over his ears, stressing the threads and busting…
-
Tilty
Tilty Gringot frowns at the fresh face of the morning and draws shut the curtains. He is an ambler and a shuffler, Tilty, and as he walks from the window to the kitchen small flurries of dust obscure his feet and gather about the legs of his pajama pants. He opens the fridge, and his…
-