Moving between years is oceanic, shuffling of consequences from reef to reef, building a math without numbers, a hope for survival that feels like certainty. While winter branches split the weather into ribbons of past and future, our presence becomes like prayer. We ask eternity to show itself without breaking what we know; we furnish … Continue reading Winter Branches
As the sun rises, we adjust to the idea that our election is now a season and not a day. It does not end at an hour or on a day, but exactly as it should: when every voice is heard. This year, the fabric of our social contract has been frayed by loss, confusion, … Continue reading Defiant
by Pablo Neruda To all those who hear not the crashing of waves this Friday morning, who being bound to a home or office, factory or mineshaft, romance or roadway or dry prison cell: to them unspeaking and blind the poet attends, opening the door that has shut them in where endlessness can be heard … Continue reading The Poet’s Duty
“where the hummingbird, wherever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away”
—Mary Oliver
To make the attempt
at something more
than the least and the longing
somehow to venture upward
into blue fine ethers
where wanting is not misfortune
where time does not steal
where happiness is an aching
and the shine of history
turns new and nubile
every morning by sunlight
spilling over sunlight
and without lament
A light has gone out.
Gabriel García Márquez wielded incomparable influence over literature across the world, during his career. His development and mastery of what came to be known as magical realism helped to bring poetry into fiction in ways both blazing and subtle. And his ability to blend the hard facts of life in the human space with sometimes raucous fantasy provided a new way of illustrating the dangerous absurdity of the conventions that dictate much of what we live.
Continue reading “Gabriel García Márquez: The Gift of Vision”
It’s not the simple
or the short or the long
or aching
that comes in waves
and tastes like history
it’s not the fact
that she was gone so suddenly
or had been there at all
or almost wasn’t
even as she wept
Absence has the flavor of meaning
but not the force
a quiet wind speaks
a clear draught of unspoken frequencies
reverberating in chambers and rivulets
of undiluted soul
the undeniable something
with no name and no braking
Recuerdo, o quisiera recordar, como te fuiste con la inocencia volando a tu alrededor en trapos medio rotos y quemados por la duda. No viene claro. No se resuelve en la vitrina de mi añoranza. Ese momento no era momento, sino milenio comprimido, catedral andina y cómplice de no sé que actor indescifrable. Cifra y … Continue reading Cifra y motor
“The boat’s slow progress through the night was like the passage of a coherent thought through the subconscious.” — Joseph Brodsky
& you were with me
strong evanescent
looming up from dreamplay
with solid destination
nesting sable in your gaze
your voice alone in the humid sphere of competing midnights ancient unswerving clarion ready to unravel the monsoon or burn away its floods with a whisper Continue reading Your Voice Alone
The Poet Economist 