Joseph Bottum

I. September New England comes to flower dying. Leaves like new-blown blossoms trail in fluttered rage from tainted trees. The year grows willful. Stagnant ponds strain to clamber quarry walls. Time slips indenture, backing age on fuddled age, confusing fall with summer-snow with hawthorn flurries, . . . . Continue Reading »

On the giant’s hill, in the child’s eye, the old house stands hermaphrodite, the mother-father rolled in light. In brazen day, that Zion’s done: a trumpet cry to still the sun. Beware, my love, beware, beware, the sky’s on fire and the air is singed along its western rim. Desire for day at . . . . Continue Reading »

For R. If I have seen geese low on the east horizon, seen the cold reeds strain in the dawn to follow, watched the first gray ice of the season take roots for the winter, that scene is no great moment in days that fathers greet a half-born child with a knife and daughters name the pain-free murder . . . . Continue Reading »

It should have been easy for Herman Melville to hate Manhattan—the “Babylonish brick-kilns of New York,” as he wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851. It was there in Manhattan he was born in 1819, at 6 Pearl Street, down by the Battery, while his ambitious, hard-driven father busily bankrupted . . . . Continue Reading »

The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer Random House, 242 pages, $22 It’s just too easy to start with a gibe at The Gospel According to the Son, Norman Mailer’s new attempt to retell the life of Jesus as a novel narrated by its hero, the Son of God Himself. There is a nearly . . . . Continue Reading »

I should have deadened the street with straw, I should have stopped the bedroom clock and stilled the doorbell chimes with crepe, I should have brought him quinine bark, exotic simples packed in teak, I should have had Te Deums sung with banks of candles, cloistered nuns to say their beads before he . . . . Continue Reading »

Death is the night watch The waiter, the wanter Death is the break The wake of the sleeping death is the waker, the watcher of sleep. death is the breaker, the waking of sleep. Down in the hole Down in the hole The frost on his fingers The blood of the sparrows the creaker is turning. he starts up . . . . Continue Reading »

There are many schools of thought to which an American philosopher may belong, but there is still only one school of American philosophy. The last few Marxists may look to Frederic Jameson to lead them, while the last few followers of Heidegger may look to such writers as John Caputo. Richard . . . . Continue Reading »

The crimson lake that laps her cheek, her scarlet kiss, her madder hair once singed the virgin martyr page but taper down at last to this: Red language, words incarnadine; black scrawl in sifted ash. When I have fears that I may cease to speak before my sullen sun and garner dark at length in day, . . . . Continue Reading »

There being neither bangled dancers swirling cloth-of-gold and green nor golden peacocks set in trees above the marble garden ponds, we are assured we are no king. O, but were I king I would command my flautists out upon the porch and golden bowls of tamarinds and pomegranate seeds in ice set down . . . . Continue Reading »