Browse Topics
Aging
Memory: Short-Term Loss, Long-Term Gain
I am not so sure it is “we” who look back. The commemorating imagination seems to come alive on its own. We are not the sole instigators of remembering; memory seems to push itself on us.
February 2022Gray Matter
Daniel J. Levitin On Why Memory Isn’t So Black And White
Seeing and hearing are selective. We register what is needed at the moment and unconsciously ignore other input. It may seem that our eyes are like a camera and our ears are like microphones, objectively recording everything, but . . . our senses are not at all like those devices.
February 2022
Test
This time my mother got it all right. / The year, the month, and the day. / The president’s name. Where she’s staying. / So she thinks she’s going home. / When I stop by the rehab center, she tells me / to make sure the heat’s turned up, / the cable switched on again, fresh / milk in the fridge.
January 2022A Tribute To Chris Bursk
The selection that follows — just a small sample of the fifty-plus poems of his that have appeared in The Sun — display the heart and honesty that first drew us to Chris’s work in 1977. A self-described “compulsive writer,” Chris once said, “I do not wait for inspiration. . . . Some days I watch the page until a few words come — and then I find myself inside the world they invite me into.” That world will be missed.
September 2021
Being Wrong
One of the great / unheralded joys of late / middle age is the mind-popping / sensation / of how many things / I’ve been wrong about, / starting with sex, / my parents, / and the meaning of the word / bruschetta
April 2021Rain Shadows
When you have been through something terrible, and you know deep down the outcome could have been otherwise, you develop a strange gratitude for everyday life. The smallest acts of generosity can make you cry.
February 2021
In The Middle
of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s, / struggling for balance, juggling time.
February 2021
Birthday
Ropes pulled tight at the huge plastic tarp / we tied from the house to the trees / like a sail, in case it rained. / It rained. I became fifty. Then the sun shone, / then the moon.
February 2021How I Got To First Base
Earlier that same afternoon All-Star slugger Dave “The Cobra” Parker had revealed to me the secret of hitting: “Hit the fucker hard, and hope it goes far.” I keep this revelation enshrined in the same chamber of my heart where my rabbinical ancestors kept their favorite Scriptures.
November 2020
If I Were God
If I were God, I would make a world just like this one, where everyone comes raw and naked and dependent into it; where everyone enters bloody between the legs or through the cut belly of a woman; where nothing is for certain and there is so much to learn.
November 2020
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