Time owns

Time owns everything.

New poems

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Butter

I made butter.

Names

If names are never true then words are never true.

How long (Wolitzer)

Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.

Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

Dangerous ground (Robinson)

A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?

Marilynne Robinson

On dogma

Dogma is a trap to divert the unwary from wisdom.

On cynicism

Cynicism squanders
what little there is.

New poems

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Dew fence

Cohesion

The miracle is cohesion,
which is really
an instant of transition.

Now

What is new is now.

New poems

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On time

Time erases far more than it reveals.

October sundown on the farm

The Hamilton Stone Review

The Hamilton Stone Review has published Issue #37 online, which contains four of my poems, "Isolate," "Diversions," "Necronyms," and "Good Enough." I'm looking forward to reading the other poems there, as it looks like they have a better-than-average mix of styles and subjects, and I'm a sucker for variety.

New poems

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On grief

Grief is memory's flower.

Probably

All probability is based on improbability.

Hanging on to (Hughes)

But he will not be frightened into awe. He never loses his deeply ingrained humour and irony: that is his way of hanging on to his human wholeness. And he never loses his intense absorption in what he is talking about, either.

Ted Hughes, introduction to Vasko Popa: Selected Poems

Calm

Calm is an illusion of coherence.

Of us

What the best of us has done
exalts the worst of us;
what the worst of us has done
taints the best of us.

Nothing (Patchett)

What she prayed for was nothing. She prayed that God would look on them and see the beauty of their existence and leave them alone.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

New poems

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Pirene's Fountain

Pirene's Fountain has released Volume 10, Issue 18: Skin Deep, which contains my poem "Presented Without Comment." They sent my copy to my old address, so I'll have to wait a bit before I get my hands on it and can check out the other poetry in there.

A fitting song (Lucretius)

Who can build a fitting song, who has the strength of heart
To match the Majesty of Things and these truths in his art?

Lucretius (A. E. Stallings, trans.),
The Nature of Things

A collaboration

Every life is a collaboration with the world.

Dullness & weirdness (Flanagan)

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not matter—professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space—was vested with the greatest significance, and everything that did matter—pleasure, joy, friendship, love—was deemed somehow peripheral.  It made for dullness mostly and weirdness generally.

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The miracles

We take for granted the miracles that everyone can do.

After

After understanding comes regret.

Only the purity (Flanagan)

She did not want...absolution, only the purity of reconciling her truth and her life, and, having done so, of standing up, turning away and leaving forever.

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

New poems

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Words (Flanagan)

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North