East Coker T.S. Eliot   V So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years — Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres — Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined…

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be John Keats When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love — then on the shore Of the wide…

In the Drawing Room How they’re all around us, these gentlemen in chamberlain’s dress and jabots, like a night growing ever darker around its Order Star, implacably, and these ladies, slight and fragile, yet made large by their dresses, one hand in their laps, small, like a tiny dog with its collar: how they’re around us all: around the reader, around the peruser of these bibelots, of which several remain their property. Tactful, they let us live life undisturbed as we conceive it and as they fail to understand it. They wanted to blossom, and blossoming is being beautiful. But we want to ripen, and this means being dark and…

Renamed. Reworked. Same basic premise as the “Required Readings” I was doing before. I recently wrote a review of Sue Sinclair’s Heaven’s Thieves, and I still find myself thinking about it almost daily. Vacation The shoddy balconies, sliding glass panels, reflected swirl of leaves.   Why does everything that appears in glass look like a face?   The mirror-trees stand half in this world and half somewhere else, a place not necessarily better than this one   but faraway and therefore enviable.   — from Heaven’s Thieves (Brick Books, 2017)