It's been a long time since I posted anything here. I only occasionally repost from another blog or website because I had wanted this to be a place where I would make my own contributions to the "genre" of the weblog. This isn't the site of my work, either; that's still my notebook. Having grown up writing with a fountain pen, not moving to the typewriter until my twenties, it is still a great pleasure for me to write in longhand, which is, I think, closer to the speed of my thinking. (I hasten to add that I am in other ways cutting-edge: facebook page, an iPhone, etc.) My point here is to define and more tightly focus this blog. For the next few days or weeks, I will post poems — sometimes with accompanying images — from my first collection, Without Paradise. Although the book is still available, copies are limited now. (I still have a box, and sometimes sell them when I read from the latest book.)

Here is the poem that opens that book:


ELEGY

— for Michael Stephen Hoffman, 1957-1970

Being in us in his new life
is as strange for him
as it is for us to be here

at his grave today
with no one else’s footprints in the snow
and only the trees that guided us

so let it not be winter there.