Meditation at Lagunitas BY ROBERT HASS All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some […]

Letter Home by Ellen Steinbaum I love you forever my father’s letter tells her for forty-nine pages, from the troopship crossing the Atlantic before they’d ever heard of Anzio. He misses her, the letter says, counting out days of boredom, seasickness, and changing weather, poker games played for matches when cash and cigarettes ran out, […]

On His Seventy-fifth Birthday By Walter Savage Landor I strove with none; for none was worth my strife, Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

My Dear Bibliophiles by Gary Margolis My dear bibliophiles, no one in the world better than you to appreciate how a lifetime reader feels (read me) choosing which books to save, which to box. Carry to the curb, to be trucked away. Donated. Burned. Buried in the library of a landfill. For time to turn […]

You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford “Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever […]

THE COLD by Wendell Berry How exactly good it is to know myself in the solitude of winter, my body containing its own warmth, divided from all by the cold; and to go separate and sure among the trees cleanly divided, thinking of you perfect too in your solitude, your life withdrawn into your own […]

Good Bones BY MAGGIE SMITH Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this […]