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Here I launch into astrophysics, but
Before I bring up billions and trillions
Of galaxies and light-years and stuff,
Let me just admit my ignorance
At the beginning, because it’s the beginning
That caught me, when they explained
About the new orbiting telescope soon to
Replace the Hubble, which will take
Pictures so far into deep space that—
Because it takes so long for the light
To get here from there, and the universe
Is thirteen billion years old—the images
Will represent what happened then.

At least the ones who survived the original series

Patrick deWitt is far too smart a writer to offer a sentimental narrative of redemption.

Mary Kane’s envelope art is focused on the act of giving. She is interested in how mailed envelopes go from hand to hand, making everyone who touches or sees them—including postal workers and mail carriers—a recipient of the gift. Her art is a kind of contemplative practice: she puts something out into the world that is designed to bless others. The painted envelopes may include rough copies of masterworks or images of women reading. “I like the idea of little pieces of art traveling through many different hands,” she writes.

You said to me once, “I love the silence when
you get where you want to go and turn
the motor off,” and it’s true, the car breathing
a little, deep in your ear ghost voices echo,
then nothing. Just sit there a moment.

I knew what you meant, like getting
to our summer place in the Berkshires,
the car whining asthmatically up our hill,
windows open, then the smell of fresh
grass a neighbor cut, no sound at all.

You can see through black limbs
across the street
upstairs in a spare bedroom window

the sun trying to get up.

It has only one beam
straight as an oboe
to tune the unleafed

and aim at some fool or sharp-needled spruce
in the wind, both yelling aaaa
surrounded by fog.

To the east a mountain
bathing in cumulus
bubbles up in the pink

The sarcastic and sacrilegious two-season show has a moral center.

We take our shoes off, leave them by the door,
And sit in batik shirts and khaki shorts
In Paul’s colonial house in Singapore.

These bungalows, called “black and whites”—the sorts
In travel ads: black timbered, whitewashed walled—
Raise ghosts of Empire dealing imports/exports.

Tonight we expat businessmen sit sprawled
In wicker chairs along Paul’s wicker bar
Because a Bible verse left us appalled.