I learned this morning that the Liverpool-based magazine The Reader has accepted my essay "On Junk and the Common Reader." I'm so pleased: considering how much British literature I read, it feels especially gratifying to receive an acceptance from a U.K. journal.

I heard on the radio this morning that today is the anniversary of the 1803 incorporation of Harmony, Maine. For more than 200 years, our town has remained small and insignificant. Seeing as I am the closest thing this town has to a poet laureate, I feel like I should pen an ode to obscurity . . . though maybe, come to think of it, I already have.

Eclogue III

All the long day, rain

pours quicksilver

down the blurred glass,

gardens succumb to forest,

 

half-ripe tomatoes cling

hopelessly to yellow vines,

cabbages crumple and split,

but who cares?

 

Let summer vanish,

let the tired year

shrink to the width

of a cow path,

 

soppy hens straggle

in their narrow yard,

and every last leaf

on the maples redden,

 

shrivel, and die.

Nothing needs me,

today, but you,

sweet hand,

 

cupping the bones

of my skull.  Alas,

poor Yorick, picked clean

as an egg.

 

How rich we grow,

bright sinew and blood,

my eyes open, yours

blue.

[forthcoming in How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)]