Browse Topics
Cancer
The World We Still Have
Barry Lopez On Restoring Our Lost Intimacy With Nature
One of the reasons we’re lonely . . . is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world, and have called this “progress.”
December 2019
Kenny
after my mother’s funeral standing in the receiving line just / below the altar rail shaking hands with people I hardly knew / when Kenny a face I hadn’t seen in twenty years appeared and / grabbed me and hugged me so damn hard the wind went out / of me
November 2019The Extra Year: Selected Poems
— from “Almost Done” | My wife has taken Pepper to the vet this morning. She is losing her hair, doesn’t like her food, has growths on her skin, moves slowly after eighty-four dog years.
October 2019Fear And Love
I wish I could make the argument that a river / and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego / are enough.
June 2019The Samples
Helplessness makes monsters of people. He’s seen chairs thrown, exam tables kicked. The rooms pathologists speak to patients in now have everything bolted down.
June 2019
The Cure For Racism Is Cancer
This strange country of cancer, it turns out, is the true democracy — one more real than the nation that lies outside these walls and more authentic than the lofty statements of politicians; a democracy more incontrovertible than platitudes or aspiration.
In the country of cancer everyone is simultaneously a have and a have-not. In this land no citizens are protected by property, job description, prestige, and pretensions; they are not even protected by their prejudices. Neither money nor education, greed nor ambition, can alter the facts. You are all simply cancer citizens, bargaining for more life.
September 2018In The Dermatologist’s Office, Again
The cancer he wanted / to cut out of my back / somehow disappeared / in the month / since the biopsy.
July 2018One Flight Up
One can die in cleanliness, or one can die in filth. I’m not talking about your soul. At the Prince Hotel — an old Bowery flophouse — the men paid a few dollars a night to live in stalls, four feet wide and six feet deep, with chicken-wire ceilings.
April 2018
Last Lecture
Recently I was invited to give a special lecture at the university where I teach. I accepted the invitation though, contrary to what my sons might tell you, I don’t really like to lecture.
March 2018
Sanctuary Sites
Throughout it all, I put one foot in front of the other, watching the gray ribbon of road unspool beneath me.
March 2018
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