#liam rector

These days. The first days of the second Trump administration. The last days of my penultimate year of teaching. The days after Covid changed everything or not nearly enough. The exact destination (until tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow) of the long generational tailwind of the 1960s and 1970s.  These Days. A song by Jackson Browne, nearly inescapable on the FM radio one August when, with my…

Age Moves --Liam Rector

Age moves in the hound As it was in me moving Through forest I found

As to dog I went That year scrounging Through Manhattan....

The wood opened out, Unlikely in the city, As to boy slandering

Hans Reading, Hans Smoking --Liam Rector

My mother, poised around behavior, would say You are sitting there reading and smoking, Hans, And this would describe for her, to her utter

Satisfaction, what it is you are doing. Knowing you I guess you are stationed there In grief, reverie, worry--your car broken

Down, the mechanic wanting money, and you without, For the moment, what it takes--and you thinking Of love lost as you read that impossible book

Your father last gave you....I see you smoking And as an addict myself I know this is something You are barely doing....The habit smokes itself

And you, you are turning the page where the woman From New Orleans, like your woman, goes to Manhattan. I suppose my mother, in her mania, could never afford

To think there was anything hovering around, anything Behind behavior. Unable to sit, to go into that sorrow Where what failed to happen presses against what did,

She would get up, go out looking for “Something Different," do anything to keep moving, behaving... Going. But you, Hans, you are a sitter, and I know

You will not be getting up until you have put this time Behind you. And so your friends pass by waiting, Wanting to know what you will come up with when you rise