In the Name of Doris, Stop

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

- "History of Desire" by Tony Hoagland, from Sweet Ruin

Worth Sharing

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

- Jane Austen from Pride & Prejudice, Chapter I of Volume I (Chap. 1)

Be a Moon

If you would not be rain my darling, then be a tree,

Content in its bounty. Be a tree.

And if you would not be a tree my darling, then be a stone,

Content in its dampness. Be a stone.

And if you would not be a stone my darling, then be a moon,

In the slumber of the beloved, be a moon.

This is how a woman spoke to her son, at his funeral.

-Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Original Arabic:


إذا لم تكن مطرا يا حبيبي ...فكن شجرا مشبعا بالخصوبة...كن شجرا...


وإذا لم تكن شجرا يا حبيبي...فكن حجرا مشبعا بالرطوبة...كن حجرا


وإذا لم تكن حجرا يا حبيبي ...فكن قمرا في منام الحبيبة ...كن قمرا


هكذا قالت امرأة لابنها في جنازته

It's Not Quite Night

The cat calls for her dinner.
On the porch I bend and pour
brown soy stars into her bowl,
stroke her dark fur.
It's not quite night.
Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.
Above my neighbor's roof, a transparent
moon, a pink rag of cloud.
Inside my house are those who love me.
My daughter dusts biscuit dough.
And there's a man who will lift my hair
in his hands, brush it
until it throws sparks.
Everything is just as I've left it.
Dinner simmers on the stove.
Glass bowls wait to be filled
with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley
on the cutting board.
I want to smell this rich soup, the air
around me going dark, as stars press
their simple shapes into the sky.
I want to stay on the back porch
while the world tilts
toward sleep, until what I love
misses me, and calls me in.

- "On the Back Porch" by Dorianne Laux, from Awake

Like Day and Night

"He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine, and began to grow very snappish. At last, we agreed to try both, as soon as the right weather came; and then we kissed each other and were friends."

- Emily Bronte from "Wuthering Heights" (1847)

And For This Right I Would Fight?

"I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie."

- Edith Wharton, American Author(1862-1937)

Eventually Yours,

"I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens."

- Woody Allen

Ain't Got Time to Die

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

- Emily Dickinson

I Love My Work

"Work is love made visible."

-Kahlil Gibran

Lessons on Life from Inanimate Objects

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

-"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider
from Another River: New and Selected Poems