“Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number – Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.”

So, I don’t normally like introductions, but this one is fantastic enough to read even if you don’t read the book.
Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1976)
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the [...]

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Seven Stanzas for Easter (John Updike)

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same [...]

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Sound and Image

This is a sestina, of sorts, that I wrote several years ago … and just re-discovered.
On the last page
of my book there is a tattoo,
a scrawled name lying on its side.
It is most definitely a waste
of space, a whisper
wafting from across
the moors. It tiptoes across
the sweating brow of the self-conscious page
who sits by the [...]

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Life

Yesterday, Becky wrote a thought-provoking little poem and I was inspired to take up my pen as well. Believe it or not, I began writing this in a romantic vein…
LIFE
Comfort stripped,
the ewe stands shorn and the wool
born is washed and bundled
into soft heaps of curly possibility;
not white.
Then, as if shears were not [...]

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Cicada

The cicada buries itself, alive.
Not for a long weekend,
not for the weeks of the moth’s chrysalis
but for many months, months that turn to years
(as months have a habit of doing).
Do they lie awake?  Consciously marking
the days of their intuitional prisons?
Are there little buzzing inspirational cicadas,
telling their neighbors to ’seize the day’?  To muster
their strength and [...]

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When God Became Small

Lightly as a falling star, immense, may you
drop into the body of the pure young girl like a seed
into its furrow, entering your narrow home under the shadow
of Gabriel’s feathers. May your flesh shape itself within her,
swelling her with shame and glory. May her belly grow
round as a small planet, a bowl of golden fruit.
[...]

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Appropriate Cynicism?

Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted,
Desolate, reluctant as any landscape
To yield what are laws of perspective
After all only to the painter’s deep
Mistrust, a weak instrument though
Necessary. Of course some things
Are possible, it knows, but it doesn’t know
Which ones. Some day we will try
To do as many things as are possible
And perhaps we shall succeed [...]

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footfalls echo in the memory

And as he talked about those old times and those dead and vanished men of another race from either that the know knew, gradually to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become a part of the boy’s present, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as [...]

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Hard questions, harder answers

I have all but been completely swallowed up by the whales of teaching, classes, and (so many) weddings (on second thought, sometimes analogies aren’t helpful). I haven’t drowned, but the blog has suffered due to occupying the second tier of importance (along with laundry and sleep).
I’m presently reading Dante’s Inferno with my seventh and [...]

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You’ll grow into it

As a child I felt terribly
grown up (or in trouble) when called it.
But my mother said that I’d grow into all three syllables.
She’d tell me how she’d prayed for a
brown-eyed, brown-haired, olive-skinned
little baby girl. A girl the grocery store clerk
would know was hers.
She refused to name me until she’d seen me face
to little, tiny face. [...]

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