home ee cummings: i thank You somewhere i have never travelled in Just- Thomas Centolella: Misterioso Louise Gluck: Formaggio Jane Kenyon: Happiness Otherwise Learning in the First Grade Bukowski: One for old snaggletooth i met a genius the worst and the best Nikki Giovanni: Photography Mary Oliver: Mindful Leonard Cohen: Interview George Eliot: Middlemarch Margaret Atwood: Sleep Borges: Ajedrez La escritura del dios Rebecca Seiferle: Seraphim ntozake shange: no assistance Pablo Neruda: Book of Questions XIV Billy Collins: Litany Nora Ephron: Remarks to Wellesley College Class of 1996 Arundhati Roy: Buy One, Get One Free George Packer: The Way We Live Now Carl Mayer: The pile theory tenets parables

Louise Gluck - Formaggio The world was whole because it shattered. When it shattered, then we knew what it was. It never healed itself. But in the deep fissures, smaller worlds appeared: it was a good thing that human beings made them; human beings know what they need, better than any god. On Huron Avenue they became a block of stores; they became Fishmonger, Formaggio. Whatever they were or sold, they were alike in their function: they were visions of safety. Like a resting place. The salespeople were like parents; they appeared to live there. On the whole, kinder than parents. Tributaries feeding into a large river: I had many lives. In the provisional world, I stood where the fruit was, flats of cherries, clementines, under Hallie's flowers. I had many lives. Feeding into a river, the river feeding into a great ocean. If the self becomes invisible has it disappeared? I thrived. I lived not completely alone, alone but not completely, strangers surging around me. That's what the sea is: we exist in secret. I had lives before this, stems of a spray of flowers: they became one thing, held by a ribbon at the center, a ribbon visible under the hand. Above the hand, the branching future, stems ending in flowers. And the gripped fist-- that would be the self in the present.