For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set […]

Honda Pavarotti by Tony Hoagland I’m driving on the dark highway when the opera singer on the radio opens his great mouth and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat. So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs as I steer through the galleries of one dilated Italian syllable […]

“Everything is Going to be All Right” Derek Mahon How should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and a high tide reflected on the ceiling? There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The poems flow from the hand […]