Joseph Bottum

Thanksgiving was always tense while I was growing up, and I don’t know why. Christmas, now—Christmas was mostly fun and presents and carols and laughter, as I remember. But Thanksgiving was arguments and huffs and recriminations and doors slamming and one indistinguishable great-uncle or . . . . Continue Reading »

We meet our griefs again when work is through and do with words what little words can do. A stranger weeps beside us through the night. Beneath our pleasant sun, we never knew the dark that hates the sky for being bright. We thought to build a garden without rue, to climb and, all-beloved, to reach . . . . Continue Reading »

On Sunday, October 7, as the United States began at last its air strikes against the Taliban, I was on an airplane, more than twenty thousand feet above the Midwestern plains”that height from which the square-edged farms and checkerboarded fields seem not quite real: a toy land, a counterpane . . . . Continue Reading »

On April 20th, at around 11:30 in the morning, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in suburban Littleton, Colorado, armed with pipe bombs and at least seven guns. After killing a student on the lawn and another in the hallway, they moved to the library, where they . . . . Continue Reading »

Say, my love, this world is whole: a windfall here beneath the bole. Or hold, my love, love’s time is now: a flourish, then the fruit along the bough. But O, my love, how hard to hold bare thoughts of love in winter’s cold. The apple limbs are bent and gray. My love, O Christ, my love . . . . Continue Reading »

From faded grass beneath the bole the last red windfall hunted down, last marigold, last aster blown, the dingy shades of autumn fall and tinctures drown.The orange-flash hunters go to ground; a gray reed takes the wind and sways. Season of death and fruitlessness: Green sea-ducks flee the leaden . . . . Continue Reading »

I. September New England comes to flower dying.Leaves like new-blown blossoms trailin fluttered rage from tainted trees.The year grows willful. Stagnant pondsstrain to clamber quarry walls.Time slips indenture, backing ageon fuddled age, confusing fallwith summer-snow with hawthorn flurries,apple . . . . Continue Reading »

On the giant’s hill, in the child’s eye, the old house stands hermaphrodite, the mother-father rolled in light. In brazen day, that Zion’s done: a trumpet cry to still the sun. Beware, my love, beware, beware, the sky’s on fire and the air is singed along its western rim. . . . . Continue Reading »

For R. If I have seen geese low on the east horizon, seen the cold reeds strain in the dawn to follow, watched the first gray ice of the season take roots for the winter, that scene is no great moment in days that fathers greet a half-born child with a knife and daughters name the pain-free murder . . . . Continue Reading »

It should have been easy for Herman Melville to hate Manhattan”the “Babylonish brick-kilns of New York,” as he wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851. It was there in Manhattan he was born in 1819, at 6 Pearl Street, down by the Battery, while his ambitious, hard-driven father busily . . . . Continue Reading »