1
The world feels both near and far right now, hatching and unhatchable, cast upon the mercy of the gods we invented to save us. The birdsong and the honeysuckle blooms are both present and absent. This aura of illo tempore glosses familiar things.
Richard Hugo, as shared by Tom Snarsky.
The chalices between the caper and caprice, as described by John Cheever in his journals:
An excerpt from John Cheever’s journals.
2
My Heresies also feels near and far; intimate and yet unapproachable. How eerie to type the words “pre-order” in this discontinuous moment, where I am grateful to be read and yet silenced by dread when facing the poems’ struggle with eschatology and teleology, a struggle that believed itself to rest in the past tense, as if MAGA could not happen again.
Hold my chalice, fellow humans. All the beer in the world won’t save us from being burned by the mirrors of this moment.
One lies on the grass “like a worm,” so to speak, only to find that the ‘kind’ of worm matters. The poem, too, is one kind of a worm that alters the soil it moves through.
Thus do leave my worms in the grass next to Franz’s . . . and study the wind in PJ Harvey’s portrait of Catherine, “Patron saint of nothing” — for we are all fashioned by the mouths and memories and music of others. Blessings and curses from the same stone.
