Deborah Warren
Mole

Earth is his occupation, and the mole
works the turf in his native breaststroke, swimming
hallways into the sod—a geonaut
supreme, and connoisseur of worms; I’ve heard him
breaking roots an inch beneath my sole
and seen how the subterranean specialist
carves out for himself a single, simple role.

I envy the expertise he brings to bear
on dirt, the narrow office he was given;
as for me, my habitat is thought,
where I grope and sweat and scrabble out a living
forced to prove—up here in a windy lair
as invisible as the mole’s—that there exists
an animal who can dig a hole in air.

I, vi

This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.

Duncan and Banquo, trotting in,
halt to admire the castle’s site,
the tender air where nesting martins
ride the dusk before alighting
five stories up under the battlements.

Hautboys, torches, barking, shouting
herald the entry of the king;
the pock-jawed groom comes grinning out;
such amenities, and making
such a good impression on the senses:

summer, nestlings—and the croaking raven
already fledged out in the spreading dark:
Drop the curtain; leave them there—believing,
witless, and eternally arriving
among the pretty deer in the castle park.
from the book CONNOISSEURS OF WORMS / Paul Dry Books
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Duncan and Banquo had no inkling what would happen to them at MacBeth’s welcoming castle. On any old day you can be ignorant that before evening—even within the next hour, or minute—you’ll be maimed, disabled, or killed  in some unforeseeable (hence unpreventable) accident. The actual event is terrible enough, but there’s also the retrospective poignancy of your previous unawareness.
 
Painting of William Shakespeare
"The Men Who Made the Bard"

"The first publisher to take a chance on the plays was Thomas Millington in the late 1500s. Millington was a small-scale operator who specialised in throwaway popular texts about murders and monsters and whose business was tucked away in an obscure corner of London. Millington issued editions of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and of the second and third parts of the trilogy of plays that he wrote about King Henry VI."

via THE INDEPENDENT
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Cover of Jorie Graham's collection, Erosion
What Sparks Poetry:
Devon Walker-Figueroa on Jorie Graham's "Salmon"

"This was a language not so much spoken as felt from deep within … and it made me, all at once, begin to ask myself new questions: what are the choreographies by which our consciousness might move—the patterns in which astonishments congregate? Can the poet witness her own inception? What tempos might our impressions take up—only to shed them later on?"
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