Reading my friend Logan Hill's excellent New York Magazine movie coverage led me to think about the friend of his he introduced me to a few years ago, the fine critic-editor Ada Calhoun, and her terrific website about kids, Babble (I read it enthusiastically even though my kids are grown), which made me think about the surprise it was to learn that Ada is the daughter of one of my heroes, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who is appreciated so eloquently by another of my heroes, the critic Sanford Schwartz, in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, which made me pull down Schjeldahl’s 1978 collection Since 1964: New & Selected Poems from my shelf and reproduce this poem of his for you this day:
NIGHT AGAIN
The sun goes down
The moon rises
It's night again
Alas, the stars
Shine with frigid
Ferocity
The world, wildly
Beautiful, gets
Worse all the time
We get sadder
No, sadder
Though more refined
Through suffering
And joy, don't we?
At night it's the truth