fine poetry to turn your world around
Coming Into FocusRereading Anna Karenina for the umpteenth time,but as a mother with grandkids, I pause at parts I once skimmed, linger on the children’slaughter and little scissors,skimming the love affairs,focusing mostly on Levin,scything in hot sun,evoking my Polish husband,fluent in Russian,who died with a well-marked War and Peace on his nightstand,whom we buried in […]
Snow White, Rose Red After Anne Sexton No matter what life you lead the body is an engine that must be fed; caviar or beetroot, the inner furnace stoked. There are other hungers, in a village of immigrants: empty bellies, like brown dogs, are everywhere. But there is a cost. And so there were two […]
water —after “the way fingers know the keys starless night” by Uncle Tommy died and Dad told me seven years later / another door he kept locked / to a room dark as a starless night / as if Tommy were still camped on our living room couch after coming back from Vietnam / don’t […]
MythologyIn those days, the wooden drawers of card catalogs still led us to the books we thought we needed, and if we were lucky, to the miracle of cross-references.The rumor was that deep in the Widener Library stacks,in Scandinavian Literature, a blanket more epic than Freyr’s magic Skíðblaðnir guaranteed lovers who tussled under its fibersthe […]
