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scholarship

December 3, 2020

to practice intense study. to research. to seek again. to require confirmation,
a proof. to believe.     to believe in knowing because it can be said
again and again. the proving of a theorem.    now the corollary: to have learned

<i>Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War</i>. By M. Susan Lindee. Harvard UP, 2020. 296pp. HB, $45.

They’re Using You to Kill People

December 3, 2020

Thomas Pynchon found an accommodating symbol in the Aggregat 4 (aka the V-2) rocket, a weapon that could not save the war for the Greater German Reich but became operational soon enough to kill thousands huddled under the throbbing sirens of London. The centerpiece of his 1973 novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, was the world’s first supersonic ranged weapon, arriving at its target before its pitched scream. 

three sections from “the house”

December 3, 2020

 erasure of a letter to the current homeowners:Dear       moment     driving through       a double take.I grew up.        twenty years ago.          [...]

On Faith and Hope

December 3, 2020

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that perches in the soul.” The avian image is both lovely and apposite, for as a bird goes winging off at the first loud noise or sight of a predator, so hope—an aspect of desire, a wish that something, and usually something good, will happen—typically flies out the window as often as it lands on one’s shoulder. If something isn’t outright impossible, it’s possible to hope for it, though the likelihood of its happening lessens the closer to impossible it comes: living to one hundred, let’s say, following a life of three packs of smokes and a porterhouse every day.

Lament

December 3, 2020

At a certain point, I lost you. I came to know it first
as a weather, the earliest hour of day breaking
on the bedsilk, its low rung of light, a pregnant silence.

Frantumaglia

December 3, 2020

Elena Ferrante’s Blurred Lines

Phantom Heart

December 3, 2020

This is the sound love makes—
tolling of a tongueless bell, its wagging
and wagging despite; its whole head
teeming with wind. The sound

If I Were Not Alexander

December 3, 2020

I would be Diogenes. Swing my lamp
through these dishonest days in search.
I myself have looked the known world
over and given everything a new name.

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