a je sus fre ak sang me a song her hair vert i cal her hea rt emp ty & full like lungs her song high & i can i be lo ng can i be high as the heave n s   ea ch str ing plu ck ed ju st e n ough… Continue reading

while I picked my nose my son played kick the can he was never in the room but he learned it anyway or my son is the carpet I am his sky it’s not as bad as it looks I try to stay clear keep my nose clean or my son is the seabed I… Continue reading

“How many collections to you guys take up each week?” A Methodist friend of mine whispered this to my parents thirty years ago or so during a visit to our Episcopal church when he read “collect for peace” in the order of service. Maybe my teenage friend was onto something. Why can’t collect — the… Continue reading

Donald Hall and I have been sending poems back and forth twice a week for forty years. At one time, we had a 48-hour rule: the other had to answer within 48 hours. My generation did a lot with letters. Galway Kinnell and Louis Simpson and Don and I and James Wright would often send… Continue reading

The Declaration of Independence contains hidden words! Shades of the Da Vinci Code. Using its new spectral imaging technology adapted from the military, the Library of Congress discovered this year that Thomas Jefferson erased – well, more like obliterated – the word “subjects” before replacing it with “citizens” in a draft of the Declaration, according… Continue reading

I hate politics for the lies, but I like it for the distortion.  Distortion gets a truth across faster than truth.  Well, it can if the viewer or listener recognizes the extent to which the communication is a distortion.  Otherwise, the distortion works like a lie, but would that be the politician’s fault?  We are… Continue reading

As I read Jacob Needleman’s book Lost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery over these last weeks of summer, I stopped swimming and for the first time felt the current of my headlong search into Orthodox Christianity.  The book helped me pull my head out of the water and look downstream.  When I did, I saw… Continue reading

Lincoln at Cooper Union: the Speech that Made Abraham Lincoln President, by Harold Holzer Harold Holzer’s book, Lincoln at Cooper Union: the Speech that Made Abraham Lincoln President, places Lincoln’s most lawyerly and politically successful speech in the context of Lincoln’s life. The book does a passable job placing the Cooper Union speech in the… Continue reading