Year: 2005

  • Forget it

    Here are two poems on a related theme. If I have already put up the Bishop poem before, I apologize. First, Billy Collins: Forgetfulness by Billy Collins The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you…

  • A long swat

    Brian’s post about the early bird, lovely post that it was, left a small, very nasal fly inside my head who has been buzzing away, demanding a good swatting. This little essay is meant to be a rolled up piece of paper with which to do away with him. Brian began by pointing out that…

  • Nemerov’s Sweeper

    The Sweeper of Ways by Howard Nemerov All day, a small mild Negro man with a broom Sweeps up the leaves that fall along the paths. He carries his head to one side, looking down At his leaves, at his broom like a windy beard Curled with the sweeping habit. Over him High haughty trees,…

  • Two by Kooser

    Anne by Ted Kooser Her body was the cellar under her life. The marks of the old floods rounded the walls. Everything that she’d had had been carried outside and burned on the lawn. There was nothing left but a few broken jars and some spiders, eating each other under the stairsteps. Everyone seemed to…

  • Miscellany

    First, I should apologize if anyone has experienced difficulty with the site recently. I had a small communication error with the webhost and some configuration files were deleted. Everything’s been recovered, but there was a day or two of garbage loading… Anyway, in straightening that stuff out, I made a few minor changes to the…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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…