A variation of delusions of grandeur are delusions of grammar, that is, the fixed belief that one’s language abilities are far superior than other people’s, even infallible. In addition to grammar, the deluded person believes his spelling and punctuation are irreproachable.
Bringing the chocolate home
An order of their chocolate-covered candied orange peels and Ice Wine Truffle Bars arrives by Fedex in August and keeps me going at the place of his birth. Under a sweet spell, I draw the fallen-in foundation, buried in biomass, stones pushed apart by tree roots and shaded by hemlocks and hardwoods. The chocolate is very, very, very good.
Silent night vigil
On this night before Christmas—a night Christians see as being more holy than most—it comforts me to know that someone, somewhere, is sitting in front of a phone, invisible as God, ready to offer an empathetic ear to the lonely, lost, and distraught. What better vigil for a Silent Night in which both finches and owls fluff and hunker against the winter chill?
Apocalyptic dreams
I dreamed I was taking clothes down from the line on a windy day and a sweat suit blown into my body by the wind wrapped its arms and legs around me like a child and held on. I carried it indoors and laid it on a narrow cot. The thing begged me to let it go, saying it would never really be Bob Dylan.
Awakening at the exact(ish) moment of the solstice
It was a moment and not-a-moment, a sliding along the curving flow, the sinusoidal wave of things, for as one thought arose so it also passed to be replaced by another. After considering the lengthening days ahead I thought with gratitude of the dark, the short, the constrained, without which the light would have little meaning.
Singing bowls with snow (Sherry O’Keefe)
too much august not enough snow
I wanted to go the year before it started—he murmurs in reply. Before trucks. Before the railroad, a white goat against the red mountain. Before tourists filled the park with snow-coaches and exhaust.
Toys Are Us
The racket
of our own loneliness is loud.
We crave a friendly crowd,smaller than us, but the same.
We carve them, make a gameof choosing their dresses and
homes, their dreams.
Remembering a missing child
When in public places the blood-bright stories
flap like order papers, like petitions in the hands
of the opportunists; when home movie zoetropes
stutter out one hot, bright thirty-second span
of a kid and a garden summer long ago, strung
between some bleak financial forecast and
another war…
The authentic world
Everyone seems to be welding, fixing things, making things in small dim workshops or outside on the dusty, potholed streets. We drive past an open shed, dark, full of big carcases hanging on hooks; past a man in a green and yellow dragon suit striding along the street, clutching the dragon’s head while his own head hangs between hunched shoulders as if depressed.
Poetry publishing and the “culture worker” model
The question of aesthetic value came up. Creeley suggested that value was created in the work, or rather, in the process of making, poesis, and in the community (or “company”) the poet/publisher built around the work (here defined as writing, aesthetics, and publishing). The professor then asked, But how are we to judge whether or not it is any good? To which Creeley responded, Who cares?