Sublime

then a castaway in the wide ocean of possibility,

it is safe to call man by his true names—trees, air, woman, fish, or man.

He was a wind chime in human form, dangling dorkily from the glorious tree of higher education.

vigil

I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.

child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in f

Back in Brooklyn, a poet-nurse to the Union dying writes: A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. Jørgen never reads these words.