Marie Ponsot, poet, translator, teacher, stroke survivor, nonagenarian writer of acclaim who wrote for twenty-five years in obscurity, single mother of seven (six of them boys!), lifelong Catholic, writer of my all-time favorite poem “Among Women” and co-author of one of my all-time favorite childhood books, The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, died a few […]
More‘Tis the season to frolic and I’m idle and sluggish. Nothing like a summer cold to sour the sunshine. And nothing like soured sunshine to call forth the de facto fairy godfather of misery, poet Franz Wright. So happened I had six Wright poems to dispose of. Leaving them around the small town in […]
MoreFeasting by Elizabeth W. Garber I am so amazed to find myself kissing you with such abandon, filling myself with our kisses astounding hunger for edges of lips and tongue. Returning to feast again and again, our bellies never overfilling from this banquet. Returning in surprise, in remembering, in rediscovering, such play of […]
MoreA two-poem salute to fathers on this Father’s Day 2019. With poems as wonderful as these, that’s as good as twenty-one guns. This excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” belongs in the wild, in air cleaned fresh by summer rain. But with no countryside excursion possible, I taped the poem to the edge […]
MoreYoung love is sweet to behold, sweeter and sweeter as I grow older. It’s also something of a wonder for a long-married person like me to think back to the beginning—to try to remember—that time—in September—when love was an ember—about to billow— [Earworm alert. . . The Fantasticks is always waiting to be sung.] […]
MoreLike so . . . In the Library by Charles Simic for Octavio There’s a book called “A Dictionary of Angels.” No one has opened it in fifty years, I know, because when I did, The covers creaked, the pages Crumbled. There I discovered The angels were once as plentiful […]
MoreIt’s a good thing I passed by a playground before I found the cemetery I was on the hunt for. Because “Happy Mother’s Day, I see dead people” is twisted, even for a twisty elf like me. But I do see dead people this Mother’s Day—my mother who died the week before Mother’s Day […]
MoreThe Bagel by David Ignatow I stopped to pick up the bagel rolling away in the wind, annoyed with myself for having dropped it as it were a portent. Faster and faster it rolled, with me running after it bent low, gritting my teeth, and I found myself doubled over and rolling […]
MoreTo His Piano by Howard Nemerov Old friend, patient of error as of accuracy, Ready to think the fingerings of thought, You but a scant year older than I am With my expectant mother expecting maybe An infant prodigy among her stars But getting only little me instead– To see you standing […]
MoreSleeping on Horseback by Po Chu-I We had ridden long and were still far from the inn; My eyes grew dim; for a moment I fell asleep. Under my right arm the whip still dangled; In my left hand the reins for an instant slackened. Suddenly I woke and turned to question my […]
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