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“a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life’s greatest pleasures…”

— Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style

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Mary Oliver, from “Trilliums,” in Dream Work

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Mary Oliver, from “Stanley Kunitz,” in Dream Work

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Mary Oliver, from “Stanley Kunitz,” in Dream Work

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Rainer Maria Rilke in his letter to Franz Kappus, 16 July 1903, featured in Letters to a Young Poet (translated by Charlie Louth)

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Franz Wright, from “The Hawk,” in God’s Silence

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sometimes i breach the surface of sleep, ermerging from its waters into waking, i find myself carrying a fragment of an unknown song. i do not remember where it is from, or what exactly happened in the dream, but i have these melodies and lyrics inside my head, echoing, echoing.

half-asleep/half-awake i record them, and in the morning when everything is crisp and sober, i listen.

in one recording i sang in slow cadence: “you have hurt too much,” and then hummed the rest;

in another i murmured softly: “to be your safety, not your bad dreams.”

the dreams, these unremembered dreams—they leave songs on the shores on my sleep.

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Happy April 25th

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“April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing

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Joseph Fasano

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Joseph Fasano

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“Sky is omnipresent, even in darkness under the skin.”

— Wislawa Szymborska, from “Sky,” featured in The New Republic, May 25, 1998

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I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan (translated by Eliza Griswold, photographs by Seamus Murphy)

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White Oleander, Janet Fitch

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Carolyn Gage, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc (1987). 

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Carl Sandburg, from “Under the Harvest Moon,” in Chicago Poems

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“Spring has come again. The earth is like a child who knows poems by heart;”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “XXI,”  in Sonnets to Orpheus  (Part One)