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Easter Egg Salad
Marginalia by Billy Collins Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other…
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Worms, Worms, Worms
The Early Bird by Ted Kooser Still dark, and raining hard on a cold May morning and yet the early bird is out there chirping, chirping its sweet-sour wooden-pulley notes, pleased, it would seem, to be given work, hauling the heavy bucket of dawn up from the darkness, note over note, and letting us drink.…
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For the Boys in March
Pinup by Billy Collins The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense That you cannot make out the calendar of pinup Drawings on the wall above a bench of tools. Your ears are ringing with the sound of The mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe, And as you look closer you notice that…
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That’s It.
A Life by Howard Nemerov Innocence? In a sense. In no sense! Was that it? Was that it? Was that it? That was it.
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Tuesday
Monday Morning by Billy Collins The complacency of this student, late for the final, who chews her pen for an hour, who sits in her sunny chair, with a container of coffee and an orange, a cockatoo swinging freely in her green mind as if on some drug dissolved, mingling to give her a wholly…
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Thaw; Kooser
I have been gone from this page for a long time and it makes me quite sad to look at the lovely things that have been written months ago and gone unanswered, unacknowledged, unheard by me. Can I respond after such a wintry absence? Do comments in cyberspace keep their flavor when thawed? Mike, your…