To My Daughter at the Approach of Her Birth

Sunday, October 6, 2013 Dear Mayah Louise Wieck, Your mother and brothers and I will call your name daily and more commonly than we take bread. And we’ll pronounce it with every inflection of emotion one can imagine, and some that we can’t yet because we haven’t met you and those emotions haven’t even begun to resonate […]

Ruins of Rome

Du Bellay in Rome  PDF view You who arrive to look for Rome in RomeAnd can in Rome no Rome you know discover:These palaces and arches ivied overAnd ancient walls are Rome, now Rome’s a name. Here see Rome’s overbearing overcome—Rome, who brought the world beneath her powerAnd held sway, robbed of sway: see and […]

belcimer: Toward the end it was difficult for him to work, and as the illness became protracted and the days were long, as it were, with complications, his spirits were often low. Perhaps the strong and daring, he said, don’t need him, but for me, as for David, who in the Gospel is always singing, […]

Rowan Williams, “Advent Calendar”

wesleyhill: He will come like last leaf’s fall.One night when the November windhas flayed the trees to bone, and earthwakes choking on the mould,the soft shroud’s folding. He will come like frost.One morning when the shrinking earthopens on mist, to find itselfarrested in the netof alien, sword-set beauty. He will come like dark.One evening when […]

Taylor Swift Trolls and the Lessons They Impart

Several years ago I posted an illustration by the artist Mark Summers that traced the artistic influence from Jonathan Swift to Taylor Swift. I thought it was funny. It was early on. I didn’t quite understand tumblr. It is by far the most popular post in the history of this tumblr with 194 notes (which […]

Incantation

settledthingsstrange: Human reason is beautiful and invincible.No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.It establishes the universal ideas in language,And guides our hand so we write Truth and JusticeWith capital letters, lie and oppression with small.It puts what should be above things as they are,Is an enemy […]

Melville without Milton

Like Shelley and Blake, Melville was charmed by the individualism and heroic striving of Milton’s Satan, and he imbued Ahab with the same sense of outsized self-mythologizing. His rereading of Paradise Lost during the composition of Moby Dick significantly altered the novel’s meaning and mythic scope. The extraordinary fact is that as late as 1849 […]

It Was the Summer of ’69 (*1)

Begin here: Christ is contingency, I tell her as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this little town that is not the town where I was raised, but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it: the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to […]

Mary Magdalene Mistakes the Gardener

Genesis 3 – John 20 Listen, I’m no mad woman. I’ve been among you,Reclined at your tables, you’ve broken my bread you dolts. It’s true: I entered the garden’s east gate andducked the bedolach boughs twisting in sinuous bark-lynch; those timbers ice-broken over winter. The footpath tangled in briars, and there I caught my foot […]

Published in The Curator

One of my poems was published today at The Curator. You can read it by following this excerpt:  An Horologist Returns to Work after His Wife’s Diagnosis.  Here hear the clock: the tick the tock the tickThe swing of pendule swung by gear-dinked chimes,Or quartz hum the pulse that clicked the quickEscape of the wheel […]