PolyArchive

Follower Seamus Heaney My father worked with a horse-plough, His shoulders globed like a full sail strung Between the shafts and the furrow. The horse strained at his clicking tongue. An expert. He would set the wing And fit the bright steel-pointed sock. The sod rolled over without breaking. At the headrig, with a single […]

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down […]

Ground Swell Mark Jarman   Is nothing real but when I was fifteen, Going on sixteen, like a corny song? I see myself so clearly then, and painfully– Knees bleeding through my usher’s uniform Behind the candy counter in the theater After a morning’s surfing; paddling frantically To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me, […]

I wasn’t always a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Of course, I knew his music (or so I thought). Who didn’t? Every song on Born in the USA had been a single, and had been played to death, right? And then he did those mediocre movie soundtrack songs in the 90s, which, I was convinced, were actually the […]

Everyone was talking about seeing the aurora borealis this past week. It was a reminder that this thing I love and obsess about is something many other people love and obsess about as well. I saw the northern lights when I was 6 years old, and I have never recovered. I will never rest until […]

J & I have been watching a TV show from the 90s on Netflix. Well, actually, several of them. The one we stream is a show that he learned to love in reruns, not so very long ago; I, on the other hand, occasionally caught a bit of it in its original run (if we […]