Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón, Bilbao. Photograph by Zarateman, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

I was fifteen in the year 2000. Turn of the millennium, turn of tables and tides. Every morning there were reports on the radio, and every night the news showed footage of the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC forces. Folding tables and plastic chairs in a room with no walls, and I don’t think anyone really thought anything would come of it.

Still, we watched. The future of our country on the screen and on a precipice. History about to reassert itself or buckle under the demands of men in linen shirts and bootlegged fatigues. At 9 P.M. every night between 1999 and 2002, the cameras settled on sweat-stained shirts and stern faces to capture the exact moment when we would all be remade with the stroke of a pen and a handshake like fishermen in a Bible verse. Microphones, dress shoes, and rifles. What’ll happen next? we asked. Stay tuned, they said.

On Sunday night, May 14, it was the same. What will happen next? We’ll have to see. I washed my shoelaces in the bathroom sink for Monday school-uniform inspection before morning Mass, while three hours north of Bogotá, a man carefully packed explosives into a PVC pipe frame, like a hermit crab slides a soft body into a borrowed shell.

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Photograph by Dzan Fotos, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

October 2022. We were making up after a long argument when I gave my girlfriend a tight hug and we heard a noise like a car backfiring.

“What was that?” she said.

“I think I broke your ribs,” I said. I’ve had a broken rib, I broke my friend Bob’s ribs, doesn’t make me an expert.

The X-ray showed a density in her lung. Next she had a CAT scan with contrast. (Never say “dye.”) After that came the pulmonologist, then radiology. Bronchoscopy. They sent her home on my birthday, still coughing up what they called a normal amount of blood. Needle biopsy and pneumothorax, a fancy way to say her lung collapsed. They kept her in the hospital on suction for two days. Then it was time for oncology. And chemotherapy and immunotherapy and thoracic surgery were still in her future, waiting.

Medical stories should not be suspenseful. She lived. Read More

Drawing by Turner Brooks.

I first became aware of the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant when, one evening, I looked out from the roof of the Yale architecture school and noticed a distant, enormous cloud of steam—so thick it looked like one could climb into it—somewhere near the harbor. After a while I realized the cloud appeared at almost exact forty-five-minute intervals. I biked to the harbor and saw the source on the far shore: a huge black form rising out of the yellow marsh grass into a marvelous configuration of towers connected to diagonal shaftways, all held aloft on spindly steel columns and cross-bracing that looked like the elegant legs of a giant praying mantis.

The belching steam emanated from somewhere in its interior. I made some distant drawings. I was in my first year of architecture school, in 1966, and this building was where industrial coke was produced. Later, under the cover of night, I crossed the harbor bridge. There were no gates or fences surrounding the complex. I found my way in, and I was quickly immersed in the most all-consuming physical environment in which I had ever been. I wandered through, first past some sheds. Between them were inscrutable contraptions that looked like giant robots, working in what I would slowly understand was a choreographed rhythm, moving the coal and coke, apparently independent of any human intervention. This apparatus clanked, crunched, and squeaked loudly. Blasts of steam erupted unpredictably from underground sources. In sheds built over the railroad tracks, one could hear the rattle, escalating to a roar, of the coal and coke being deposited into huge steel bins. Read More

Photograph by Nancy Crampton.

Over a morning cappuccino in a small but lively European café that spilled onto the central square of a town near the sea, I first read “The Country Husband,” my introduction to John Cheever, on a website I later discovered was inaccessible in the U.S. The website, all in Arabic except for the stories, was an arsenal of midcentury American fiction, a canon I had resisted knowing anything about.

I was, at the time, in a phase of my development as a poet that I would call fiction-averse. I thought poetry was what you discovered, like a rare ore, when you unbuckled the artifice that contained language in narrative. Naturally, then, I tried to write poems that rejected anything that might pass for fiction: smooth, grammatical sentences, captivating or manipulative plotlines, and, most egregious, the implicit desire to wrangle language into utter invisibility while the reader watches a movie in her head.

“The Country Husband” was, at least by reputation, so exactly what I’d been avoiding that I’m not quite sure why I chose to punish myself by reading it. The story concerns a man, Francis Weed, who lives in Cheever’s invented Westchester town, Shady Hill, with his wife and children. Weed falls in love with the babysitter, the most cliché thing a married suburban father can do. She doesn’t love him back, and he doesn’t change his life for her, and that’s the story. He must learn to live past this rupture in his heart.

When I read the story, I was convalescing from an affair with a married person. I did love him back, and he didn’t change his life for me, and since you can’t heal at home from a heartbreak nobody knows about, I had gone abroad. Nothing in my life seemed to be working, and I must have searched up Cheever as part of my attempt to try the opposite of everything I had been doing. I had to admit that in the mirror “The Country Husband” held up to me, I appeared a little less broken than I felt. Writing from Francis Weed’s point of view, Cheever had, at a time when I really needed it, validated my experience of how powerful and real and obliterating extramarital love can be—even and especially for the married party. This, by the way, was years before the ubiquity of open marriages made moot the need for affairs, the way de Tocqueville has described the democratic election’s quelling the need for violent revolution. But the impulse to escape, resist, defy; the flirting with destruction, complete overhaul, change—this doesn’t go away just because one container for it has gone licit. Read More

Fireworks in Eberhardzell, 2018. Photograph by Andreas Weith. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When I met Richard, he said, “I’m not a Cartesian. I feel no division between my body and my mind. I don’t even think my mind is confined to my brain. I think it’s everywhere in my body and even outside me.” I said, “Me too.” That was nineteen years ago. He said, “The right hand can’t give the left hand a gift.” I thought it could, although maybe you would need to be an octopus. He said, “You can’t jump into the same river once.” That was obvious.

On New Year’s Eve, you look backward and forward at the same time. Time stops, and you are in the now. You make resolutions you can’t keep—on purpose. You promise to be reborn, but you like your funk. And it’s so much easier to let yourself down than to let down another person. Richard says, “Every promise invites a change of heart,” and when he says this I feel a wave of love for him rise up, or a wave of love for the human mind and the pleasure it takes in maintaining its shape.

I’m making Richard sound like the wooden fortune teller in the penny arcade, where you slip a coin into a slot and she spits out a fortune-cookie saying. This is a compliment to Richard. The fortune teller knew a thing or two. Every promise of course invites a change of heart. Last year, when we got married, we promised nothing. Read More