Light is Speech Marianne Moore, What are Years 1. walking on water in the morning light, walking on water near the boat of saints, the water clear as the conflagration of the dead upon the shore in pyres, this dream you come in my dysphoric grief to wrap your arms about me, but instead blue crabs surround you and between their infinite blue claws they close your … [Read more...]
Plain Sight
Behind a scarred metal door, painted red and inset with two locks that opened to keys in shapes I never saw in the States, including one that looked like the Philips head screwdriver on my old swiss army knife, my Lviv apartment was laid out like gilded railroad cars: hardwood floors shined the whole length of the apartment, from the cubby for shoes off the stairwell to a … [Read more...]
“My Friend the Censor”: Henry Miller, Huntington Cairns, and Tropic of Cancer
In September 1934 the American writer Henry Miller, age 42, had published in Paris his autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer. In that same month, 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean in Washington, D.C., the Secretary of the Treasury appointed a young Baltimore lawyer as the official U.S. Censor. One of the new censor’s first acts was to place Tropic of Cancer on the list … [Read more...]
All Night You Dream of Ice and In the Morning Wake to a Skiff of Snow
After all these weeks of rain and gray, the sky a fitted sheet on the too bulky mattress of mass, last night there were white blossoms in the trees and snow on the earth and your hair grew long and light-filled and you rode through town on a polar bear. Who knows what dreams mean when the body is this white waxing flesh or white waning flesh, pale or bright and orbiting … [Read more...]
