I could look to the trees rusting in the rain,
doing the death we call pretty. Instead, I lord
a little over people parking, coming & going                             remark silent
on their body language—what gait is revealing—
while I wait by the printer for a report
I don’t even need. The chore, it let me remember
the world, free & flowing. On the hospital elevator

this morning, an ancient head-scarfed woman
w/a beard, wheeled by four jockeying children.
A young, halfway-pregnant couple. A woman                  my mother’s shape
in a bob wig, on her way to the breast clinic.
A surgeon’s Crocs streaked w/purple-brown blood.
Jackson Pollock. In the caf, a man tosses fries
into his mouth for breakfast, his entire head & eyes

bandaged up, white & soft as a Q-tip. Vision
is my drug. I can’t tell if it’s working, b/c how
did my life become a sequence of                                                  how do I kill
the next ten minutes? & the next ten? & the next?
When is someone going to finally turn to me & say,
all this time, what have you been doing?
It will be an accusation, & a mercy.
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Head shot of Seamus Heaney
"How Seamus Heaney Became a Poet of Happiness"

Stephanie Burt re-assesses Seamus Heaney in the light of his posthumous book, 100 Poems. "Seamus Heaney was real. Were he a fictional character, however, we likely would call him unrealistic, his life story and his career too good to be true. Like Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, but perhaps with fewer missteps and regrets, Heaney became the sort of modern poet whose best-known phrases circulate without attribution."

via THE NEW YORKER
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"'Gravity' from Sister Urn addresses how Rexilius navigated the knowledge of her sister’s passing on social media, the kinds of questions received there. In conversation, Rexilius has told me 'Gravity' was the first poem she wrote after her sister’s passing. She writes, 'This is the line of outcome.' Cause and effect, the consequence of action, the poem announces that it will attempt narrative in order to account for the unaccountable."
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