Trees and Stars (live, Bowdoin)
Thorpe Moeckel reading “Trees and Stars” live at Bowdoin College, September 18, 2008.
Thorpe Moeckel
Thorpe Moeckel Q&A with audience, Bowdoin College, September 18, 2008
Thorpe Moeckel answers audience questions following his reading at Bowdoin College, September 18, 2008.
Night Walk
Maybe the eyes are only just at night, if they can be just at all when open. Maybe everything seen is seen again, but not now. Now, what’s fixed moves, and what moves isn’t there. Now, as trees sliver in their roots, the limbs dispense another remedy for shallow breathing. Far off there’s barking, and […]
Squeal Like a Pig
some guest would always holler on the bus, or in the parking lot before getting close to the river, and I’d turn, half expecting Dickey come barreling up – dirty grin, hemorrhoidal gait. It’s not my favorite line of his, but I love him for that scene & all his elegant, bestial pomp, how the […]
Middle Fall
It was a reunion. It was holy differently again. I would not find such unbarren society, such theater of revere. The kingfisher in its pale-collared habit had fewer places to hide and flew wildly, dodging leaves no longer there. What was eaten was spared. Exposure, delight’s face, faced the interior out. Flight made no bones […]
Lifejackets
If as baby’s bibs on the four old growth NFL linemen in my raft, the lifejackets were like bloated articles of faith on the Baptist youth group who’d fifteen-passengered up from Pascagoula all night singing Our God is an awesome God he reigns from heaven above. And if there was something of Houdini in how […]
Southern Crescent
First light in Clemson: sweet gum, sudden suddenness: phlox in ditches, Slurpee of trumpet creeper – a train, always looking, is always lost. Even at the crossroads of Yonah Mountain and County Line – lost with its thin face, grimace and square eyes. See the runoff and fescue, red clay and pine. Lost, and a […]
Beginning to Peel
To lay among the pale stations of maple leaves in a breeze, the ground a soft bedding where wild ginger mingles with cleavers and mayapple in patches so dense it seems the cyclopic blossoms need no light but that which oozes from leaf-rot & old nut husks, their hulls upturned as though dragged from moorings […]