PolyArchive

I love, love, love T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (previously). The words, “We shall not cease from exploration” give me goosebumps every time I read them. How does one take those words to heart, to take a visceral experience and illuminate the everyday tedium with it? To just not cease from exploration? Can it be that […]

The Infinite Sky There’s a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown says, “I’ve watched this movie twenty times, and Shane never comes back.” I feel the same way about Prince Andrey Bolkonsky in War and Peace. Recently, I did a freelance project (a Cliff Notes type thing) for W&P, and so I read it for […]

Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet – people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the number of the shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic […]

That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

29 Some rides don’t have much of a finish That’s the ride I took Through good and bad and straight through indifference Without a second look There’s no intentions worthy of mention If we never try So hang your hopes on rusted-out hinges Take ’em for a ride Only time will tell if wishing wells […]

  The last manned moon landing took place on December 11, 1972– nigh on 40 years ago. Whether or not you believe it was real, in the end, that wasn’t the point. The “Space Race” was the capstone of decades of a shared imagination of a future of unlimited promise and wholly unfamiliar, something that […]

Dolor Theodore Roethke I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, and comma, Endless duplication of lives […]

A Blessing James Wright Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth onto the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have […]

In A Dark Time Theodore Roethke In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood– A lord of nature weeping to a tree, I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the […]