From Thomas Merton

“When you are by yourself, you soon get tired of your craziness. It is too exhausting. It does not fit in with the eminent sanity of trees, birds, water, sky. You have to shut up and go about the business of living. The silence of the woods forces you to make a decision which the tensions and artificialities of society may help you evade forever. Do you want to be yourself or don’t you?…Are you going to stand on your own feet before God and the world and take full responsibility for your own life?”

- Thomas Merton, from Contemplation in a World of Action

If you've enjoyed 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!

James Schuyler - "A blue towel"

went with us to the beach.
You drove the Green Bomb,
your panel truck. Sand
dunes and signs: “No parking
Between Signs.” “Prohibited
On This Beach…Hard Ball…
Intoxication…Bonfires…”
Mist, filterable sun.
Oh breakers, and leaping
spume! We spread the towel
where we could lie and watch
the fierce and molten wonder
of the water. You wore blue
trunks, and took off a
striped Roman shirt and kicked
off Gucci loafers (and you
think I’m hard on clothes).
We lay and watched and
smoked. I studied sand
and the sand-like freckles
on your back and, smaller
than small, one blackhead
(later removed). And thought
beach thoughts: after sex,
man is sad, some Roman said.
Did he mean, because the
pleasure’s over? It’s the
day after last night and I
am anything but sad. Quiet
content, a little tired: we
do go on so. Then we walked,
you in surf, I on scoured
sand, firm, and running to
escape the waves that almost
got my sneakers. Then we
walked back. Your trunks
were partly wet, as though
you’d pissed your pants. “I
think,” you said, “I’ll go
in after all.” Then there
you were, bobbing in breakers,
leaping high to ride their
great and breaking crested
curl. It scared me (a
lousy swimmer) just a
little. “That’s the way,"
you said when you came
out, “I like it. It’s
almost warm enough.” I saw
your chest and side be-
side me, pearled with
water drops. The mist
moved off. We sat and sunned
—it was late, no tan today—
and watched the repetitions
of the sea, each one
different from the last,
and saw how a log was
almost hurled ashore then
taken back, slipping north
along the shore. The flies
were something else. “These
insects are too much: let’s
go back.” The blue towel
and your trunks I hung out
on the line. You took a
shower. I made drinks. Quiet
ecstasy and sweet content,
why are not all days like
you? Happy with someone,
and that someone you, to-
gether on a blue towel
on sand beside the sea.

- James Schuyler

Thomas Merton - "To belong to God I have to belong to myself..."

“To belong to God I have to belong to myself. I have to be alone—at least interiorly alone. This means the constant renewal of a decision. I cannot belong to people. None of me belongs to anybody but God. Absolute loneliness of the imagination, the memory, the will. My love for everybody is equal, neutral, and clean. No exclusiveness. Simple and free as the sky, because I love everybody and am possessed by nobody, not held, not bound.

In order to be not remembered or even wanted, I have to be a person that nobody knows. They can have Thomas Merton. He’s dead. Father Louis—he’s half dead too. For my part, my name is that sky, those fence-posts, and those cedar trees. I shall not even reflect on who I am and I shall not say my identity is nobody’s business, because that implies a truculence I don’t intended. It has no meaning…Now my whole life is this—to keep unencumbered. The wind owns the fields where I walk and I own nothing and am owned by nothing, and I shall never even be forgotten because no one will ever discover me.”

- from The Sign of Jonas

The park bench scene From Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

“Waking up, she realized she was at home alone.

She went outside, and set off in the direction of the embankment. She wanted to see the Vltava. She wanted to stand on its banks and look long and hard into its waters, because the sight of the flow was soothing and healing. The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.

Leaning against the balustrade, she peered into the water. She was on the outskirts of Prague, and the Vltava had already flowed through the city, leaving behind the glory of the Castle and churches; like an actress after a performance, it was tired and contemplative; it flowed on between its dirty banks, bounded by walls and fences that themselves bounded factories and abandoned playgrounds.

She was staring at the water—it seemed sadder and darker here—when suddenly she spied a strange object in the middle of the river, something red—yes, it was a bench. A wooden bench on iron legs, the kind Prague’s parks abound in. It was floating down the Vltava. Followed by another. And another and another, and only then did Tereza realize that all the park benches of Prague were floating downstream, away from the city, many, many benches, more and more, drifting by like the autumn leaves that the water carries off from the woods—red, yellow, blue.

She turned and looked behind her as if to ask the passerby what it meant. Why are Prague’s park benches floating downstream? But everyone passed her by, indifferent, for little did they care that a river flowed from century to century through their ephemeral city.

Again she looked down at the river. She was grief-stricken. She understood that what she saw was a farewell.

When most of the benches had vanished from sight, a few latecomers appeared: one more yellow one, and then another, blue, the last.”

- From Section 4:29, in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, 

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. 

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

- Marie Howe

The end of the year

has always felt distinct to me,
the quiet of the week between Christmas and the new year.

Here’s a poem I’ve never published
that’s been on my mind—

Poem for the End of the Year

The year comes back, or won’t let go.
December in the quietest hours, Monday evening,
dark before its time. The letters arrive
in cold bundles: greetings, cards, late notes
from high school social chairs
all bringing the same news: the places we belonged to
grasp toward us from the past,
trapped in their time.

It’s good to think about those you haven’t
thought of in a while. I think down
into my childhood: Sierra Lurie
twirling in December
at the bluegrass gathering
in the cavernous tent. I watched her spin
amidst the candles,
though she hardly knew I existed.

Years later and there’s smoke
coming from the hospital grates,
a street of dead traffic lights,
a pale trail in the darkening sky.
You can feel how close it is to the solstice:
The trains moan from far away,
the thin cranes rise like scaffolding
for spaceships awaiting departure,
the shopkeepers in their empty stores
gaze through their phones,
lonely for anything.

I feel sometimes how unreal
the lives of strangers are.
I try to imagine their front doors,
their faces around a kitchen table,
the people that they love,
the beds in which they sleep.
I want their lives, in this way,
to become more knowable.  

I speak to you earnestly from this cold late date
though my complaints seem vapid. I miss
my sister. I miss those I once knew. I’m lonely
for places I once existed in
inside the past.

Sierra’s father’s name is on all the city’s hospitals.
His daughter took her life. I think about that
sometimes: If she’d been given more
kindness. If the phone had rung that afternoon
as she sat on her bed and considered what to do. 

I have to imagine it. The dead don’t rise
like marionettes. The sky stays furrowed
and goes on forever. It is Monday night
in the empty kitchens. The line of gravestones
stick up in the dark like raised hands.

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”