The New Republic

The date's a sentence that can be parsed: pattern, symmetry, sequence. Can I parse the sky this morning, its complex syntax of cirrocumulus suggestions? The sunlight's breaking, broken. Light on the hills is thinner than yesterday's illumination. The flooding creek is still out of its banks, but lower. An impulse to measure, mark: the river the rain the times of sunrise sunset. I don't know how to take in the fact that we are at war: overreaching, aggressor, outlaw. In the garden snowdrops and trash, READ MORE >>

Blue gray, damp, vague—September morning is banal with small desires: sleep, hunger, self-doubt's rehearsals. Where to plant the butterfly bush, the new dogwood, the aster you want to bloom this fall? Should you have written that letter or held your tongue, allowed the friendship to lapse? In August wildflowers along all the roads are yellow, gold: pale mullein, goldenrod, black-eyed Susan's blaze: READ MORE >>