Adjourn Sojourn

It's because the earth continues to wobble on its axis that we continue to stumble down the streets of the heart. It's because of the loneliness of the first cell trying to swim through its primordial pool that we are filled with a kind of galactic fear. For example: one moment a rocket falls capriciously into a square. Another moment, a rogue wave turns over the fishing boat whose crew leaves their memories floating like an oil slick that never reaches shore. In this way we understand our dying loves scratching at the door. In this way, each love creates its own theory of pain. Each love gnaws the derelict hours to the bone. But because there are so many blank spaces in history we still have time to write our own story. Wittgenstein said our words have replaced our emotions. He never understood how we have to cleanse ourselves of these invisible parasites of doubt and fear. We might as well worry about the signals from dead worlds wandering around the universe forever. Think i...

It's not happiness, but something else; waiting for the light to change; a bakery. It's a lake. It emerges from darkness into the next day surrounded by pines. There's a couple. It's a living room. The upholstery is yellow and the furniture is walnut. They used to lie down on the carpet between the sofa and the coffee table, after the guests had left. The cups and saucers were still. Their memories of everything that occurred took place with the other's face as a backdrop and sometimes the air was grainy like a movie about evening, and sometimes there was an ending in the air that looked like a scene from a different beginning, in which they are walking. It took place alongside a scene in which one of them looks up at a brown rooftop early in March. The ground hadn't softened. One walked in front of the other breathing. The other saw a small house as they passed and breathed. The reflections in the windows made them hear the sounds on th...

It's as if the dark, which had before just been context, gave to vulnerability a permission, almost: fleshy saucers of spilled cream, so many parchment fists, unfisting; and now, in pieces, the delicate mask of an indifference offered radically up against what, each time, seems as unthinkable, as unexpected, as when, in the long dream of retraction, that sea that is finally not a sea, but what else to call it, begins again its shifting, and though to every push of the will forward there's something noble—which is to say, something lonely, also—it's too late. Carl Phillips Speak Low Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Metallica has been officially enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea — sporting blue hair — gave the intro. "Metallica is fucking rad and their music is bitching," he said, causing James Hetfield to cover his young daughter's ears. "They did more to bring people together than any other peace-and-love band ever did," he added. This was literally true at the ceremony: Metallica flew in 150 of their friends and family for the event. Former bassist Jason Newsted, who hasn't performed with the group since he quit in 2001, was around for the weekend's festivities. If there's any bad blood, he certainly hid it well. "I've been levitating all weekend," he said during his speech. He later performed with the band and his replacement, Robert Trujillo, on "Master of Puppets" and "Enter Sandman." Both musicians played bass and often shared a mic on back-up vocals. Earlier, or...

Louise Gluck I have a friend who still believes in heaven. Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god, she thinks someone listens in heaven. On earth, she's unusually competent. Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness. We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it. I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality. But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes. Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out according to nature. For my sake, she intervened, brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across the road. My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness— My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person— In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. W...

Stephen Dunn One day it will vanish, how you felt when you were overwhelmed by her, soaping each other in the shower, or when you heard the news of his death, there in the T-Bone diner on Queens Boulevard amid the shouts of short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious. One day one thing and then a dear other will blur and though they won't be lost they won't mean as much, that motorcycle ride on the dirt road to the deserted beach near Cadiz, the Guardia mistaking you for a drug-runner, his machine gun in your belly— already history now, merely your history, which means everything to you. You strain to bring back your mother's face and full body before her illness, the arc and tenor of family dinners, the mysteries of radio, and Charlie Collins, eight years old, inviting you to his house to see the largest turd that had ever come from him, unflushed. One day there'll be almost nothing except what you've written down, then only what you've written down well, then lit...