David Means, from "Lightning Man"

To get away from Chicago, he bought the old family farm, rebuilt the big barn, installing along its roof line six rods with fat blue bulbs attached to thick braided aluminum wires dangling from the barn’s sides. The horizon in those parts let the sky win. Even the corn seemed to be hunching low in anticipation of the next strike. In the evenings he read Kant and began dating a woman named Stacy, a large-boned farm widow who dabbled in poetry and quote from T.S. Eliot, the whole first section of “Ash Wednesday,” for example, and entire scenes from The Cocktail Party. Nick was fifty now, lean from the fieldwork, with chronic back pain from driving the combine. But he loved the work. He loved the long stretches of being alone in the cab, listening to Mozart sonatas while the corn marched forward into the arch lights, eager to be engulfed by the mawing machine. Behind the cab—in the starlit darkness—emerged the bald swath of landscape.

- from “Lightning Man”, in the collection The Secret Goldfish

Thomas Merton, from "Contemplation in a World of Action"

Take the enjoyment of our daily bread. Bread is true, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know. Maybe one of the troubles with modern life is that bread is no longer true bread. But around here, in this monastery, we have good bread.

Things that are good are good; and if one is responding to that goodness, one is in contact with a truth from which one is getting something. The truth is doing us good. The truth of the sunshine, the truth of the rain, the truth of fresh air, the truth of the wind in the trees, these are truths. And they are always accessible!

Let us be exposed to these in such a way that they do us good, because they are very accessible forms of truth; and if we allow ourselves to be benefited by the forms of truth that are really accessible to us, instead of rejecting and disparaging and despising them as “merely natural,” we will be in a better position to profit by higher forms of truth when they come our way.

- Thomas Merton, from “Contemplation in a World of Action”

On Yom Kippur

As You separate sacred from profane,
separate us from our wrongful ways.
Give us a future—
our children countless as grains of sand.
Give us peace—
majestic and beautiful as the starry night.

Homesteading

It would be easy if the spirit
was reasonable, was old.
But there is a stubborn gladness.
Summer air idling in the elms.
Silence hunting in the towering
storms of heaven. Thirty-two
swans in a København dusk.
The swan bleeding to death
slowly in a Greek kitchen.
A man leaves the makeshift
restaurant plotting his improvidence.
Something voiceless flies lovely
over an empty landscape.
He wanders on the way
to whoever he will become.
Passion leaves us single and safe.
The other fervor leaves us
at risk, in love, and alone.
Married sometimes forever.

- Jack Gilbert

Three Photos - Alec Soth

Alec Soth. Two Towels, Canada, 2004. © Alec Soth.

Alec Soth. Near Gainesville, Georgia, 2014 pigment print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. © Alec Soth.

Alec Soth. The Key Hotel, Kissimmee, Florida, 2012; pigment print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. © Alec Soth.

From Psalm 124

“…If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us:

Then they would have swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled against us;

Then the waters would have overwhelmed us, the stream gone over our soul;

Then the proud waters would have gone over our soul.”

- from Psalm 124

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Consider checking out my book of poems, NORTH AMERICAN STADIUMS.

Published by Milkweed Editions (2018), the book is described by Booklist as “Exquisite…Chambers executes a magic that is perhaps unique to poetry: he conjures a moment from nothing, draws the reader inside, and disperses the spell with something as gentle as a shift in the wind direction, or a quiet revelation…A crackling first act by a promising new poet.” 

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