s ynchronicities in a day's reading: I started this morning reading the poet and critic Bill Berkson's portrait of the poet and critic Edwin Denby (two of my favorite poets.) One of the things that struck me in the portrait was that Edwin Denby spent the end of his life obsessively reading Dante's Paradiso. So I started reading it, James Cotter's translation given to my by Dr. Cotter himself this past Easter. Later I listened to a New Yorker podcast about W.S. Merwin's poem in the New Yorker, Rain Light. Rain Light All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the wh
So much happens every day. This happened one day. I set an ingenius trap to catch a mouse. You set one bowl with its lip resting on a round cracker or peanut. You set a second larger bowl with its lip rest on the round edge of the first bowl, just so. When the mouse takes the peanut it releases the larger bowl and catches the mouse. Then you take the trapped mouse to the forest and bid it adieu. A better mouse trap has not been invented. Or so I thought. Well, on this particular morning,I noticed the trap had been sprung. So I looked down and saw that the larger bowl had snapped the poor mouse's neck. His little eyes seemed to be looking up at me in disbelief, even though it was surely dead. My breakfast didn't taste right after that. But it got worse. Because on the way to school I was listening to a lecture on Coleridge to prep for teaching a class on The Rime of The Ancient Mariner. And Richard Holmes, the great Coleridge biographer, read from a letter by Coleridge wh