Author Archives: Lex Gill

FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY ONE

John Berryman’s Dream Song 14, via Laura Olin. Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.   After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,   we ourselves flash and yearn,and moreover my mother told me as a boy   (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored   means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no   inner resources, becauseContinue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY ONE”

FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY

From Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (more excerpts from Maria Popova, here). I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. …. How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. IContinue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY”

FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SEVEN

Thanks, by W.S. Merwin. Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water thanking it standing by the windows looking out inContinue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SEVEN”

FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE

“We Lived Happily during the War” by Ilya Kaminsky, via Poetry Unbound and the Poetry Foundation. And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protestedbut not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I wasin my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chairContinue reading “FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE”