Iron Rails and Water Dreams
White Pail, Pyramids and the Running Sun
Hymn to the Father in Us All
A German Opera in Portugal
Meditation Among Stones
Blue Light Below the Arctic Circle
Aristotle, Plato and Appalachian Fog
Night Riders
White Caps Booming Against the Shore
Autonme Memoire en Provence
Timing
Flowers on the Mall
The River
II Danse Macabre
Autumn Sonata
A Plan for Leaving
Airborne
A Public Burning
Wolf Moon in Autumn
Green Words and Bright Orange Shoes
On a Rainy Night in Oakland
Marco Polo, Stella and the Bengal Lights
Limning the Hunter’s Moon
Outdoor Art Museum by the Sea…show more content… Paul Kalanithi, a New York neurosurgeon, dying with incurable cancer at thirty-five, in a piece for the New Yorker that one reviewer called
“an essay about death, crackling with life,” said, “staring into my ‘Bright
Abyss’, I’ve become both actor and playwright in its high darkness, seeking in the straight crookedness of language about my own death, the wild silence within us, if not dulled by the knife blade of solitude.”
It is hard not to be reconciled to bittersweetness of words self-delighted by their inwardness, the immense light they draw from childhood, and the evanescent yearning that lets them play tennis against time.
Like W.H. Auden’s “the most powerful poem about life is a poem about death,” these poems seek to connect the past to the future, body to soul and imagination to reality, poems written in what Wallace Stevens called
“…that hum of thought, evaded by the mind”. The poems study our rep- etitions and rituals, searching for what we sing when we’re not aware we’re singing, telling us that without death there would be no seriousness, no joy nor despair, no tragic or comic voices seeking the meaning of