Image credit: Medieval Pattern Poem, 9th Century. Rabanus Maurus. The Public Domain Review.

What constitutes enough? The Old Oak looks frail and young ones will, now, never get that old. The earth shivers with plastic. Stars in their remoteness no longer render me small and solidly placed. Over the ocean, over Lake Michigan, I looked to the horizon until Infinity erupted in a lick of methane vapor. Now, I have cut grass, cello, wind, thoughts, you, words.

I go granular. I find significance, beauty, in descriptions of the ugliness, in enactments through words that articulate vibrantly, viciously in their accuracy and relentlessness.

Lucy Brock-Broido’s poetry enacts beauty via this kind of paradox. Her books contain “an ineradicable appetite for the new, but also for the void…grief that acts out forever, that will not end,” says the Paris Review. Here is Brock-Broido reading “Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements.”

Image credit: "Kensico Screen Chamber...Contract 55." Science, Industry and Business Library. NYPL Digital Collections, 1918.