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Susan Sontag is down in New York City tonight writing and she wants to explain something to you. She has it sort of figured out, or part of it, and she would like to set it straight for you. William Gass is out in St. Louis thinking and he has a series of connections between…

Why does one say that the heart sings? when it is not the heart, but the voice that does: if the leg could sing, it might; if the pump lodged in the chest could sing, it would make such clear deep sounds, as only that cellist makes, playing Bach, the man of the brook, whose…

A pink motel hovers over the river, Shangri-la where local athletes purchase local women in the lounge . . . Is this where I grew up? I paddle in my Oldtown canoe, looking for relics of riverbank that pre-date highway and turnpike. Blackberries ripen by the black water, a snapping turtle suns on a rock,…

I get there with a huge sack slung over my shoulder: brown, with patches. The gate is locked, the moon up like a thumb. I came through the forest where the spider balances on its web, carrying eggs for the branch. I came through the valley where the slow rope of mountain climbers let themselves…

To be alive to witness the snakes’ return to chase the papists and britons from Faerieland allowing Patrick’s sisters prayers to Druid gods: O pagan green! Mo Chraoibhin Cno! Siobhan, throw your ribbon round the last six. Braid them tightly, let them rest close on the velvet hills: O pagan green! Mo Chraoibhin Cno! And…

We counted the epochs with venerable names, with dry      thorns, with dry asphodel — Justinian, Mavrikios, the Androniki Kommini Paleologi, Mr. Manouil with his long worry beads made of thick      amber — “Renowned city” they called it; “the cloud-topped      stronghold of all that is Greek”; and the three reservoirs opposite the illustrious Sea of      Myrtoo…

In the dream I carry inside me, which is no dream, I am always the child between them. A family sits down to supper, the yellow kitchen yellow with light. Father sits here, and Mother sits here, and this chair in the middle is mine. Someone argues or complains. Or maybe there is only the…

Atomized grandmother, recluse, generation gone to fragments, I am above Chicago for the last time, meeting you outside the window, still alone in your lonely particles. A drift of shattered lace and bones. I fly through your rising dust, cutting through like a scythe, above you and with you. And now we are flying together,…

Love is the hardest rock and the fragile, brine-drenched      ships, love is the other ship of rock, the untraveled, yet      thousand-times traveled ship on the highest seas — oh the chafing of patience — with love I fashioned death,      with love also my work; I went down — he said — to the town market,…