Reading Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires and am just knocked out by it. The poems about Michiko are so heartbreaking. The poems about Pittsburgh so surprisingly brash and convincing.

I wanted to try and write about choosing your own disaster. Again, hard to excerpt this poem, as it’s one long sentence, which seems to be happening lately. I like the idea of a long sentence snowballing and yet (I hope) never losing the reader. So here’s a snippet, just an image.

excerpt:

the frozen lake that could support a woman, a man,

                                    and the weight of their proximity,