An old grandfather with half-closed eyes and yellow beard slumps early with drink on the steps of my clinic, acting out his affliction under a marble arch. Every excess leaves a scar– If only he had chosen love for his addiction, he might have drunk that cup to its secret, sweet, muddy dregs […]
A week before the lease was finished and I had to leave that place, iris and lilac exhaled urgent freshness over the yard, breathing from purple tissue so tender as to be torn by sunlight. In the morning a moon hung at the end of every street, testing the limit of fullness, soon to be […]
In October, three postcards come from wandering friends: a cottage on a cliff, with hollyhocks leaning over the sea; fat beds of lavender resuscitated at Giverny; the brief bluebell wood at Brooklyn Botanic. Why do they put these gardens upon me? I’ve got no lease to these rooms, I’m too old, it’s too late, […]
Without my knowing, the clasp opened on the subway platform, a clatter on the tiles I only hear in retrospect, and now someone else must be enjoying my watch with its Navajo turquoise, much admired by friends, by my doctor of ten years, who is ill himself now, and takes no calls. Was it […]
This flashing creature, my niece, dives to the blue bottom to fetch something I’ve thrown there. Sudden knowledge strikes me: I am not the person everyone was waiting for, but she might be, undine, this slip so whiteblond and blue, poet for whom all the journals are searching, teacher, immunologist, secret saint, person to […]
People have died in these mountains, the sign at the bottom warned, do not attempt a trail beyond your capacity. After an hour’s climb I reached the old sanatorium, and panted at the door of those rooms now choked with thistle and prickly pear, where the sick had drunk their milk and slept on […]
Patrick Donnelly, author of the poetry collection The Charge, talks about a poem he wishes he’d written, William Meredith’s The Illiterate.
Patrick Donnelly, author of the poetry collection The Charge, talks about how “poetry has helped [him] live [his] life,” including the three poems read at the scattering of his mother’s ashes.