Gregory Crosby

@monostich.bsky.social

3782 Followers 996 Following

Poet. Author of Said No One Ever (2021) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018). https://buttondown.email/gregorycrosby

Whoever You Are: A Letter Someone who does not know you somewhere is cleaning his rifle, carefully weighing the bullets that will put you out of his life. Someone, perhaps the figure you see in the rearview mirror, is living ahead of your death, dreaming the sick world green. Someone is already climbing a tower in Texas, is halfway up, is at the top, has sought you out and lifts his gun as though this death had anything to do with you.
Two sexy AF sunflowers.
A copy of Keith Waldrop’s Light While There’s Light.
A copy of Colson Whitehead’s new novel Cool Machine.
Kathleen Ossip Marriage So much for the fighting and the sex, I want to be alone with you in the next room.
The sun, seen through the haze of wildfire smoke, a pale orange disc seen through tissue paper.
THE ALCHEMIST OF SORROWS Creation basks in this man's fire, While that man nullifies the sun; What symbolizes death to one Inflames the other with desire. Intimidating Trismegist! Transformed by your hermetic curse, I am a Midas in reverse-- A most ill-fated alchemst, For I transmute gold into lead, Convert the heavens in my head Till even clouds solidfy, Enshrouding all my cherished dead, And on the coast of Zion I Construct immense sarcophagi.
For Once, Then, Something BY ROBERT FROST Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Prayer for the Icy Hand of Death to Grasp Their Hearts At the center there is only the edge, the mind’s dagger that swerves & then staggers, that breaks against the delusion & swagger, that greets you as you step out on the ledge. It’s both a long way down & longer up: to climb the calendar, gasping for air, or meet the earth, that passage to nowhere. We tried to drink deep from the loving cup, & never saw the bead of bad luck drop upon our breast. So now we know the score. Now we know where to direct our prayers, our thoughts. We know better, now, than to stop. Here at the edge, we are not as before. Slip & stumble, trip & fall, down the stairs, & hit the wall.
Fairfield Porter, "Jimmy and John" (1957-58). Jimmy Schuyler, in a black sweater, looks off in one direction; John Ashbery, in a white shirt and gray slacks, looks off in the opposite direction.
A manual typewriter with a sheet of paper in it.
M. Ilin's 100,000 Whys: A Trip Around the Room, published in 1933.
One steps on a rusty nail, disbelieves in lockjaw one thinks forever without a thought
A Facebook post in which someone asks, "Does anyone have a favorite translation of Dante's Inferno?" to which the poet Mary Jo Band replies, "I like the one by Mary Jo Bang, but that's just me."
A panel from Fantastic Four #50, by Jack Kirby, in which Reed Richards threatens Galactus with the Ultimate Nullifier, a terrifyingly powerful cosmic weapon that resembles a staple gun.
The little girl from Them! (1954) wandering the desert in catatonic shock.
The Young Martyr’s Lament O God, You lit the fuse while I was cradled beneath my mother’s heart. Too late, Your face, in faces I will shatter— & now I fly apart.
A Yellow Sonnet (Incomplete) thinking sunny thoughts of my sunny boy on my desk a piece of yellow paper reminds me that on Tuesday we will enjoy each other in a tower whose top sees all Manhattan as it seeks the skip of a yellow square of sunlight on the floor.
A tree stands split down the middle, almost as if it had been peeled.
A cartoon by B. Kliban in which a mermaid sits on a suitcase by the side of the road, her thumb out, holding a sign that reads COAST.
A parody of Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" that's put her on the vast empty lawn of the "Great American State Fair."
MB: We’re both the same. You became Joseph Heller, and I became Mel Brooks. Before you became Joseph Heller, you were free to do barrel loops and insanities. You were stuck after “Catch-22” because you had a hit. Once you have a hit, you’re chained to capitalism. You’re inextricably linked to supply and demand. I did “The Producers,” I was free. I did “The Twelve Chairs,” I was still free. I did “Blazing Saddles,” I was captured. JH: You were a prisoner. MB: I was OK for a while. “Blazing Saddles,” great movie. “Young Frankenstein,” top of my game as a director-writer. After that, capitalism. Artists shouldn’t work because they can sell; they should work because they’re inspired.
Philip Jeffries (David Bowie) screams as he rematerializes in a deleted scene from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
A copy of Maxims and Proverbs of Old Korea.
In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. Nature has no compassion. It is, in the worlds of William Blake, " a creation that groans, living on death; where fish and bird and beast and tree and metal and stone live by devouring." Nature accepts no excuses, and the only punishment it knows is death.
A middle aged man, shaved head, white beard, dark glasses, white summer shirt, sits in front of a bamboo wall. He has a reading tonight and suddenly hates everything he’s ever written.
The day I learned my wife was dying I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had a good life, I’d punch him in the nose. How much life represents a good life? Maybe a hundred years, which would give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo and take the train to Vladivostok, learn German to read Thomas Mann in the original. Even more baseball games, more days at the beach and the baking of more walnut cakes for family birthdays. How much time is enough time? How much is needed for all these unspent kisses, those slow walks along cobbled streets?
jouska n.a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a devastating comeback, a cathartic heart-to-heart—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage that feels far more satisfying than the small-ball strategies of everyday life.
THE MOUNTING SUMMER, BRILLIANT AND OMINOUS A yellow-headed, gold-hammered, sunflower-lanterned Summer afternoon: after the sun soared and soared All morning to the marble shining heights of marvelous blue, Like lions insurgent, bursting out of a great zoo, As if all vividness poured down, poured out, poured Over, bursting and breaking in all the altitudes of blaze, As when the whole ocean rises and rise, in irresistible motion, shaking; The roar of the heart in a shell or the roar of the sea beyond the concessions of possession and the secession of time’s fearful procession, precious even in its continuous perishing. —Delmore Schwartz
James Merrill Grass The river irises Draw themselves in. Enough to have seen Their day. The arras Also of evening drawn, We light up between Earth and Venus On the courthouse lawn, Kept by this cheerful Inch of green And ten more years—fifteen?— From disappearing.
A used copy of Gregory Crosby’s Said No One Ever sits on a shelf.
Gift I speak from the limit of night I speak from the limit of darkness and of the limit of night If you come to my house, O kind one, bring me a lamp and a tiny opening through which I might look at the crowd in the happy street
A devastatingly handsome (if you're into that sort of thing) middle aged man in a panama hat and a blue linen shirt stands at a microphone reading poems while fantastic clouds read their own poetry high above him.
Two men fight inside a brewery vat while another man holding a gun watches from above.
A 2026 quarter showing a ridiculous idealized pilgrim couple on one side and the Mayflower on the obverse.
Extended Play The thing about time is that it’s chronic. Better get out of sundown before town, before the dead light devours those wolves, the hours that hunt you higher, lower, than high & low can know. The gardening never ends: the pruning, the where-it’s-at that’s clipped from nowhere, & then it’s night, again, stars unseen against the carnival of light bleed. What are you really made of if not this, this stupid brick? Out of sorts, under the covers, the bed a black box for recording dreams. Trains of thought, the cars full of darkness. You could live a 1,000,000. You won’t. Time is stride: you, a stumble.
A cel of Daphne Blake, bound and gagged.
Sunday June 7 1:30-3:330 pm, Gowanus Canoe Club, 165 2nd Street, Brooklyn. With Melinda Wilson, Dennis Nurkse, Susan Michele, Gregory Crosby.
A portrait of Lord Byron in Greek costume, over which some anonymous person has written, in the classic early white font of memes, BACK THE FUQ UP, IS THAT LORD BYRON? FUCK YA, IT IS. SCANDALOUZ ASS MOTHERFUCKER. LOOKIN ALL GANGSTA & SHIT. LOOK AT THAT TURBAN. NO, LOOK AT IT. AND HE'S BRITISH. HE'S NOT EVEN INDIAN OR ALBANIAN OR WHATEVER THE FUCK. LOOK AT THIS GQ MOTHERFUCKER. MOTHERFUCKER JUS DUN GIVE A FUQ.
John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus Nancy Lemann, Lives of the Saints John Le Carre, Smiley's People Daniel Krause, Angel Down Daniel Kehlmann, The Director Lincoln Michel, Metallic Dreams Karen Russell, The Antidote
The Loch Ness Monster's Song Sssnnnwhuffffll? Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl? Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl. Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl - gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm. Hovoplodok - doplodovok - plovodokot-doplodokosh? Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok! Zgra kra gka fok! Grof grawff gahf? Gombl mbl bl - blm plm, blm plm, blm plm, blp.
The book cover: a b/w photo of a woman on a bicycle next to a pay phone.
A picture of Nabokov with butterflies reflected in his glasses
It was hard for us, the way you died every day, slowly and then all at once, just as such things are said to happen. Spring came, so soon it almost seemed you could’ve waited, but I know, I know, you couldn’t wait. My head was full of names of flowers, and I kept picking stones out of the earth as if making room for you—organic matter, ions and atoms, the clock of your body still ticking somewhere, but backwards. I have given up, you’d said. If I sometimes felt it could be all right that things went this way, it was because I knew the end was not the meaning of your life; it was something else instead— a series of small explosions, brief flame, color and light, the breeze lifting the hair from your cheek. It was those moments when you took your picture in the mirror and the camera widened and narrowed its one eye sleepily, like a cat loving you. All those close-ups of flowers. There was the dying back, right down to the ground, and the months and years where nothing grew, but some summers they opened and opened and opened; like the slash of red lipstick on your perfect mouth, this was it, this was living, and the whole show took your breath away.
The cover of an exam blue book.
The Sinister Six: Electro, Mysterio, Dr. Octopus, The Vulture, Sandman, Kraven the Hunter.
John Lithgow with flaming red hair and bad teeth, in a greatcoat, holding a microphone.
Will Eisner's The Spirit, in fedora and eye mask, emerging from water and looking very, very angry.
Adverse Abstraction Gregory Crosby S.E. Hamlet May 15 Otto’s Shrunken Head 538 E. 14th St. NYC 6-8 pm
A bumper sticker that reads Happiness is the planet earth in your rear view mirror.
A raccoon on a fire escape scratches his neck before going back to snoozing.
Nosferatu The trouble is, you don't necessarily realise you're a vampire. No one tells you. You pass it off, even if only to yourself, as various forms of aristocratic eccentricity--keeping odd hours, a knee-jerk contempt for French cooking, feelings of an isolated eminence. And so, as you lick your lips slaveringly--so excited you barely notice the fangs-- at the thought of the umpteenth delectable, lily-white neck, your heart seems to flutter with love, not premonition.
Unknown The Moon that fell from heaven When the Moon fell, he fell from heaven from heaven on the porch. When the Moon fell, he fell from heaven, and no one saw him fall. The Stormgod let rain fall, he let rain fall on him, the Moon who fell from heaven. He let the rains fall on him. Fear seized him, the Moon who fell from heaven, afraid upon the porch. Anguish seized him, the Stormgod who let rain fall let rain fall from heaven to the Moon upon the porch. From the 1350–1190 B.C.E. Hattian-Hittite text The Moon That Fell from Heaven
Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, said: “I didn’t see anything in terms of the shooter except I just entered the room about five minutes ago and I was talking to people from the Boston Globe and my old friend Kerry Kennedy and then I think a secret service agent threw me to the ground and on top of some other people and people were screaming and yelling. “Apparently there was a shooter in the lobby and, at least the rumor is, that the shooter has been killed and is dead in the lobby and that’s really all I know. I was just trying to get over to the NBC table – these people had invited me and I never even made it to the table so I felt bad.”
When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have express'd Even such a beauty as you master now. So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring; And, for they look'd but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing: For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
The cover of John Williams’ novel Stoner.
A small dog closes his eyes while getting scratches.
Dark clouds and sunlight
Torgo from Manos the Hands of Fate
“I know kung fu.” It won’t bring back the world. 5:15 a.m.: I wake from another dream, the same as every dream. A man builds a ship in my chest. Each of the sailors carries by her breast a picture of her sister. The ship is not the image of a ship. Beyond its sails there are no stars. The water is only water because it’s black. 5:15 a.m. Perhaps you’ve seen me practicing my moves in the empty prison yard and wondered whether you were the dreamer conjuring me into existence from the bare desire to caress a phantom ship and my death the death of your desire.