Here’s my favorite thing about the moon: A moonwalker said when he’s looking at the sky, he sometimes suddenly remembers: That’s my moon, the same moon I walked on. (To each their own moon.)

We realize the same things over and over, new every time.

We are born not remembering why we walked into the room.

Notes

The title and last line of “About Suffering” are indebted to Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The phrase “we become lyrical when we suffer” is from a James Longenbach essay (but I didn’t remember the source at the time of writing). The line about Turgenev is taken from his biographical note in the Penguin Classics editions of his novels. The phrase “forty minutes of desolate shuffling” is borrowed from Paraic O’Donnell.

In “The Idea of Beginning,” the book in question is A Dictionary of Symbols by Juan Eduardo Cirlot, translated from the Spanish by Jack Sage and Valerie Miles.

In “I’m Not Mourning,” the italicized lines are from Bashō.

The title “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die” is from Montaigne. The line in quotes is from Wikipedia.

In “I Don’t Want to Hear Any Good News or Bad News,” the line about the Middle Ages is from The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn.

In “Historians of the Future,” some of the quoted language comes from Jennifer M. Gidley’s The Future: A Very Short Introduction.

The title “That It Is Folly to Measure Truth & Error by Our Own Capacity” is from Montaigne. The line about a poem as a hologram is from Ted Hughes’s Paris Review interview.

In “Mirror, Mirror,” the phrase “mon semblable” is from “Au Lecteur” by Baudelaire.

“Bright & Distant Objects” is for Janaka Stucky.

“Stop Thinking & End Your Problems” is a line attributed to Lao Tzu.

The title “We Taste Nothing Pure” is from Montaigne.

The title “The Beginning of Understanding Is the Wish to Die” is from Kafka’s notebooks. I have lost the source of the “God is faithful” line.

In “Desiderata,” the line about general relativity is from The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene.

“Certain Conditions” is for Sommer Browning, Erin Costello, and Sarah Rose Etter.

In “Moon News,” the first line quotes from a Reddit post that links to an article on the NASA site.

Throughout, there is stray quoted material for which I have lost the original source. Mea culpa.

The fifteen-line poems were all written in the summer of 2020. They are for John Cotter and Michael Joseph Walsh.

Acknowledgments