April 16, 2015
A Box of Pastels by Ted Kooser I once held on my knees a simple wooden box in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken. It was a set of pastels that had years before belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt, and all of the colors she’d used in her work lay open before me. […]
April 15, 2015
Swimming By Night by James Merrill A light going out in the forehead Of the house by the ocean, Into warm black its feints of diamond fade. Without clothes, without caution Plunging past gravity– Wait! Where before Had been floating nothing, is a gradual body Half remembered, astral with phosphor, Yours, risen from its tomb […]
April 14, 2015
The Want of Peace by Wendell Berry All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman’s silence receiving the river’s grace, the gardener’s musing on rows. I lack the peace of simple things. I am […]
April 13, 2015
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. […]
April 12, 2015
Three for the Mona Lisa by John Stone 1 It is not what she did at 10 o’clock last evening accounts for the smile It is that she plans to do it again tonight.
April 11, 2015
The One Girl at the Boy’s Party by Sharon Olds When I take my girl to the swimming party I set her down among the boys. They tower and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek, her math scores unfolding in the air around her. They will strip to their suits, her body hard and […]
April 10, 2015
[in Just-] by e.e. cummings in Just- spring .when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles .far .and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it’s spring
April 10, 2015
We are pleased to introduce Evanston artist and statistician Lynn Torbeck as the next to be featured in our ongoing exhibition series Local Art @ EPL. His show – Art in Science – is currently on display on the 2nd floor of EPL’s Main Library where you can catch it through April 30th. Intrigued by […]
April 9, 2015
The Day Winds Up the Opposite by August Wilson Hearing her disembodied voice wash over me, A cascade of coin and blessing, With the delicious sounds of her waking I thought today might be a day of blazing sun With her hair a forest of red birds announcing themselves with song & surety That each […]
April 8, 2015
To A Waterfowl by Donald Hall Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks applauded you, my poems. These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes, who close their briefcases and ask, “What are you in?” I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry, and their eyes […]
