beautiful

the archivist February 6, 2024

Ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,        Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express        A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape        Of deities or mortals, or of both,                In Tempe or the […]

the archivist November 24, 2023

Wild Geese Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile […]

the archivist April 23, 2021

The Far Field Theodore Roethke I. I dream of journeys repeatedly: Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel, Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula, The road lined with snow-laden second growth, A fine dry snow ticking the windshield, Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic, And no lights behind, […]

the archivist October 1, 2019

Songs out of Sorrow IV. Wisdom Sara Teasdale When I have ceased to break my wings Against the faultiness of things, And learned that compromises wait Behind each hardly opened gate, When I have looked Life in the eyes, Grown calm and very coldly wise, Life will have given me the Truth, And taken in […]

the archivist July 10, 2019

“All this time I was writing, writing no matter what else I was doing; no matter what I thought I was doing, in fact. I was living almost as instinctively as a little animal, but I realize now that all that time a part of me was getting ready to be an artist. That my […]

the archivist January 1, 2016

“Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.” –Yoko Ono

the archivist August 3, 2015

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers […]

the archivist May 9, 2015

The End Mark Strand   Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end, Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end, Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never […]

the archivist March 12, 2015

Going, Going Philip Larkin I thought it would last my time – The sense that, beyond the town, There would always be fields and farms, Where the village louts could climb Such trees as were not cut down; I knew there’d be false alarms In the papers about old streets And split level shopping, but […]

the archivist September 14, 2013

Happiness Jane Kenyon There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the […]

the archivist July 17, 2013

I wasn’t always a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Of course, I knew his music (or so I thought). Who didn’t? Every song on Born in the USA had been a single, and had been played to death, right? And then he did those mediocre movie soundtrack songs in the 90s, which, I was convinced, were actually the […]

the archivist April 25, 2013

“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.” “Certainly.” “You say that a man’s first job is to earn a living, and that the first task of education is to equip him for that job?” “Of course.” “Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of […]