Essay titles and excerpts

Brief and intense lyric essays, longer explorations: I hope the reader will find these delicious, moving, and (occasionally) provoking. . .

Imagine

Imagine knowing that our fate is each other… Imagine doing what you’re good at and in love with, even if it doesn’t pay so well. That would be like coming back to life, wouldn’t it?

Six Good Places

What makes a good life in the city?

Forgiving the Present

Here we are in the murk of the present. It’s like the fog of war, except that the war is over there and the fog is here. Here in America we’re unable to find our way, frustrated, baulked, angry, guilty. Yelling at the TV.

Red Door

Resurrection isn’t automatic. It takes an act of extreme imagination, steely and wholly unlikely.

Rendition

The lie of power is that it is total and will last forever. It wishes to fill the horizon and blot out all other thought. Resistance, at its core, may be simply remembering that this is indeed a lie, an empty pompous boast.

It is the beginning of summer 2007, and no effective voice in America is raised against torture. Democrats quail and fold, unable to find the boldness of fragility. Progressives speak in soundless vacuums. I try to write in hope, but I cannot see what good it will do.

I wonder if any of us can be saved.

After Rendition… Silence

Maybe [these essays] will serve in retrospect as a marker, like what you see in towns that have been flooded: a muddy line on a wall. Perhaps a scrawled message – We were here. This is how high it got.

Under Pressure, We Make Lists

We will need to make poetry of our desperation, as the Founders did. We will have to love our moment, declare our values, and act for the generations.

Night Thoughts and Music, Three Days Before the Election

Our collective self is not only a mob, a direct-mail target, an object of self-interest and manipulation. Sometimes we are the instrument of transcendence.

City Gods and Sacred Waters

Wherever wildness breaks out is grace and a glimpse of the spirit – whether in tangled bank or cityscape – ecosystem or mind, art or music, solitary ramble or solidarity of the plaza.

Things I Have Experienced but Do Not Believe In

I can’t really say what it meant. But the sage smelled like blessing – resiny, fragrant, unexpected. I can smell it still.

I had no idea how much blessing I would soon be needing (no one ever does). Nor how much I would find, stronger than my obtuseness and deeper than any jargon or borrowed mysticism: blessing woven it seems right into us, and into all the world besides.

SOME MORE TITLES to tempt readers…

On Pleasure

Empty Pods and Pleasant Graveyards

Poetry on the Elliptical

Unlocking the Hips

Un-hating the Muir Trail

Lacking the Subjunctive

Threat Level: TEAL

When Denial is Public Policy

O Felix Obama

How to Be a Progressive (Without Believing in Progress)