Category: Art
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On poetry and knowing things
Today a child tossed a white stone into green water. As it sank, it turned pale green, then darker green until I could no longer pick it out from the green of the depths. At that instant, it disappeared forever. But you and I know better. We cannot deny its presence, its truthfulness. We mark…
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Intimacy
What I always wonder in a place like this is how many people have walked this ridge before, over how many centuries and what have they thought looking down, across, overhead into the trees, towards each other? What, that is different from my crowded thoughts right now? Where are you, earth? Someday, I will find…
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Roman ruins lying off a square in Arles
Muscles of stone hold fast one on top of another, watch time slip by in tiny packages, endless streams pouring forward, memory perfect. When did this corner round off? How did this carving waste away? You needn’t ask; it is known. Rough-hew blocks exhale their millennial sighs, add rhythm to time, note each breeze with…
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Karma
I sat here at this table many years ago. The door was on State then, not Chicago; three shops sold coffee here since. On Tuesday evenings, a homeless man muttered to himself at the window, staring into his coffee, while I ran through course notes at the next table, coughing on his stench, not knowing…
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All things dissolve
holding out, holding in breathing out, breathing in revolving in, out of grasp rolling forward, retreating glow of strangeness, familiarity a curtain swaying across the sill between isolation, intimacy images flip, return to face me who we were, who we become where we were, where we find ourselves what we knew then, what we still…
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Muse
all the books we read together you over my shoulder, I over yours in the stumbles over words, unwieldy sentences, empty space before thoughts slowly form when we wander without aim you hold your breath, allowing chaos to braid into sense and unravel yet again
Poems from in between 