The intimate common

Hello my friends. I bring you this month another poem, which I wrote as a kind of inversion of the weariness we are collectively feeling right now. The weariness stems, it seems, from imagining ourselves situated deep within this mess, tiny and wretched amid the tangle. What if instead we situate the mess within ourselves? As an intricate puzzle at the center of that familiar chamber we each visit time and again, one after another, but always alone? The poem is called Sea that has become known.

A painting of a dark shoreline strewn with stones large and small. To the right is a steep green bank, and to the left the sea illuminated silver-blue by the golden moon, which hangs at the center top of the painting and descends to the beach on a series of flares. A rowboat is anchored in the calm water.

Moonlight on the beach, Edvard Munch, 1892

The poem that originally accompanied this letter will appear in Drift Gestures, forthcoming in 2023 from The Lune.