The Dancing

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a post-war Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop—in 1945— in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany— oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

— Gerald Stern

Joan Didion

“I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning light, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor.”

- Joan Didion, from “Goodbye to All That”

From The Inferno

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.


Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.

But when I reached the foot of a hill,
there where the valley ended
that had pierced my heart with fear,

looking up, I saw its shoulders
arrayed in the first light of the planet
that leads men straight, no matter what their road.

Then the fear that had endured
in the lake of my heart, all the night
I spent in such distress, was calmed.

And as one who, with laboring breath,
has escaped from the deep to the shore
turns and looks back at the perilous waters,

so my mind, still in flight,
turned back to look once more upon the pass
no mortal being ever left alive.

- Dante, trans. by Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander

If you've liked what you've seen on the site...

Consider checking out my book of poems, NORTH AMERICAN STADIUMS (paperback version now available).

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.” 

Thanks so much, and I hope you continue to enjoy the photos, poems, prose, and music here!

From Psalm 139

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven; thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

- Psalm 139: 7-11

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