Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer Prize winner, former Poet Laureate, and Editorial Board member for The Common, celebrated his 90th birthday on March 1. Here are photos from his birthday celebration at Amherst College.
I bend to earth. My fingers trace woodworm tracks along a beach log. I hold a frog in my hands and see patterns of mottled green. I’m looking for patterns. My Southeast Alaska landscape is woven on spruce baskets. On my walks, I’m like the ancient weaver who noticed a tree’s shadow reflecting on water. She moved her hands as if she weaved air. Later, with spruce roots between her fingers, she weaved the-shadow-of-a-little-tree on her basket. In her ancient Tlingit belief, the shadow of a tree is evidence of the spirit inhabiting the tree. The spirit is woven in shadow pattern, which becomes the “spirit of the basket.” The Lingít word aas daayí means tree bark, yet also describes the physical shell of a human being—aas daayí. In the Tlingit worldview, personhood is connected to the spirit of the trees, that is, people and trees share the same skin.
Five miles north of the town of White Heath, Illinois, some houses have clustered close enough together to be called a neighborhood. Each is set on no less than two acres; most have five or more. Blacktop roads dip and curve through the land, bubbling with tar in the summer, buckling into washboards after the breaking cold of winter. Here, twenty-five miles west of Champaign, a few shallow hills wrinkle the land, which stretches out flat on every side in one-mile grids of corn and soybeans.
One of several names given to a ghost island that appeared in July 1831
When the buried volcano erupted,
sulfuric smoke leapt from the Sicilian sea,
seeped through locked, felt-lined chests,
blackening the silverware.
With burning eyes
she rose before dusk
the mountains beneath her
and all the hills
filling like window panes with liquid suns
If I forget you Jerusalem, may my right hand wither away. . .
If I do not remember you . . .
—Psalms 137:5-6
To write in Jerusalem
in a garden
with a wind that comes from the mountain
under a canopy of grapevines
By HONOR MOORE
Of sheets and skin and fur of him,
bed of ground and river, of land,
or tongue, of arms, the wanton field,
Waterfalls of curtain like spray –
Pine needles–flame–shimmer.
The curtain has no secrets from the stage:
You are the stage, I am the curtain.
1. LAMENT
Hippolytus! Hippolytus! It stings!
It sears… my cheeks blaze…
How pitiless the hell, Hippolytus,
Concealed in your name!
*
Daily land for the craving landlubber
givest us this day,
art the way. Stars and Mars
inconsolable shine,
sway,
entwine
in the trite.
Salvage cars, salvage cars in the night.
Ignite.
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Celebrating 15 Years