charlie hensler
LightNews LightNews
banner
chaswriter.bsky.social
charlie hensler
@chaswriter.bsky.social
800 followers 1.6K following 140 posts

"Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you"
- John Ashbery

Posts Replies Media Videos
chaswriter.bsky.social
sun out in november thus a walk in the woods
photo of a trail in the woods. a leaning alder. sun through the trees.
November 19, 2025 at 10:29 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
last of fall around here
late fall foliage in the pacific northwest late fall foliage in the pacific northwest late fall foliage in the pacific northwest late fall foliage in the pacific northwest
November 9, 2025 at 3:45 AM
chaswriter.bsky.social
a fall walk in the park
photograph of a line of smaller maples, across a green park lawn, under a partly cloudy fall sky
November 8, 2025 at 10:48 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Victoria Chang -
Passing | Victoria Chang Someone said, at first we want romance, then for life to be bearable, at last, understandable. I am frightened, now that the trees look like question marks, how the moon makes strange noises but it’s daytime. Bells have begun to notice me.
November 2, 2025 at 8:51 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
a spooky ghost poem I forgot I had written -
Ghost In the late, tilted hours I can find you sitting in a derelict sedan hood in the blackberries, last sun slanting through the dusty glass. I did not choose my absences you will tell me—the days became a parade of ghosts, one introducing the next— one made of tattered newspaper, another colored shapes gliding behind beaded glass. Such presence—you can’t imagine you will say, folding back into your blue silence, lighting a cigarette though you never smoked.
October 31, 2025 at 5:11 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
A little ode for a dear one.
The Music Lover The adagio was the shadowed street deep in the neighborhood, unnamed, a window open on the green afternoon. No one walked there. No one came. When she did, she stepped into a wind, a lush crescendo and looked, looked back again— disappeared in the sudden arms of violins.
October 19, 2025 at 5:36 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Louise Glück, on fall.

"Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?"
Matins | Louise Glück You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?
October 4, 2025 at 6:35 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
my narrator
Fireplace scene from The Big Lebowski. Mr. Lebowski sits dejected before the fire, questioning his life in light of the kidnapping of his wife, while The Dude smokes a jay, all to Mozart's Requiem.
October 1, 2025 at 7:00 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
a late dahlia
Close up of a vibrant red dahlia bloom.
September 25, 2025 at 7:38 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Robert Hass, "To A Reader"
#smallpoemsunday
To A Reader | Robert Hass I’ve watched memory wound you. I felt nothing but envy. Having slept in wet meadows, I was not through desiring. Imagine January and the beach, a bleached sky, gulls. And look seaward: what is not there is there, isn’t it, the huge bird of the first light arched above first waters beyond our touching or intention or the reasonable shore.
September 7, 2025 at 6:07 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Here's one for fall - and thank you @mayacpopa.bsky.social for picking this up in Poetry Today's August poems. 🙏 🙏
Suddenly Autumn, And The Light We have come down from summer pockets empty. The sun tilts low again and the rhododendrons follow, gray-green and chromatic. The boulevard crows, wings folded, contemplate the long shadow just clinging to their tree. How the festival goers have become the color of late grasses and leaves, the balloons gone in the particle wind. Even now the towers are calmly sealed, the disappeared behind the blue glass, heads bent, reflecting. See how the sun skips off the lake, its platinum sheen. Cool in your hand the smooth, flat stone you found at summer’s graveled edge, and kept. - Charles Hensler
September 4, 2025 at 5:04 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Robert Bly

"they wag but can't explain"
The Resemblance Between Your Life And A Dog | Robert Bly I never intended to have this life, believe me— It just happened. You know how dogs turn up At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain. It’s good if you can accept your life—you’ll notice Your face has become deranged trying to adjust To it. Your face thought your life would look Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten. That was a clear river touched by mountain wind. Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed. Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers, Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee. You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you, But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow. Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles, Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.
August 13, 2025 at 2:55 AM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Ah, Henry. From today's Paris Review email.
“He is prone. Smoke on the iced lake, freer …” John Berryman He is prone. Smoke on the iced lake, freer than Henry, hovers. Something is being made or is a something⁠—⁠Henry no seer⁠— he may go into that line⁠—unmade being? Now Henry too is drifting away black.
August 10, 2025 at 5:22 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
I'm going to have to watch again - on the first pass the dioramas were all I could take in.
Image from the movie Phoenician Scheme, directed by Wes Anderson. A bathroom from above, with Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) in the bathtub, with breakfast and a book, a phonograph nearby, a bottle of champagne(?) on ice in the bidet.
July 29, 2025 at 5:18 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
a good morning to lean and loaf - relieved of my cranky gallbladder the other day
A sunny deck with potted plantings, crossed legs i. the foreground.
July 24, 2025 at 6:14 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
an afternoon of incoming rain, rejections, and a bike ride with pelicans
June 27, 2025 at 12:11 AM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Aracelis Girmay

"This is the only kingdom."
Elegy | Aracelis Girmay What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed? Perhaps one day you touch the young branch of something beautiful. & it grows & grows despite your birthdays & the death certificate, & it one day shades the heads of something beautiful or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out of your house, then, believing in this. Nothing else matters. All above us is the touching of strangers & parrots, some of them human, some of them not human. Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom. The kingdom of touching; the touches of the disappearing, things.
June 25, 2025 at 9:19 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Li-Young Lee's description of a "formal realization" made in his poem in the Yale Review, and...I sip my coffee, realizing I know nothing 🙄.

yalereview.org/article/li-y...
Describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of this poem. The poem engages all of the traditional and founding patterns of poetry: the tragic pattern (all verbal meaning grows in opposite ratio to breath, at the expense of breathing); the spiral (verse turns and turns, creating a spiral, a nautical chamber that is God-bearing, or God-revealing, since the Fibonacci spiral, present in all things, is the fingerprint of God); syntax (sentence pattern); the structure of definitions, which requires that the Word never appear in the definitions of the Word (the pattern of True Love).
June 18, 2025 at 5:19 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
prolific this year, the foxglove
A lush hillside full of pink and white foxglove.
June 8, 2025 at 2:25 AM
chaswriter.bsky.social
oh hello there
A bright pink peony in full bloom.
June 1, 2025 at 8:47 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
The best sort of mail - thank you @alinaetc.bsky.social
A picture of “My Heresies” by Alina Stefanescu, which has arrived in the mail.
May 25, 2025 at 5:57 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
Alice Notley

"If you love me, all
of nature, let the wind blow."
Backyard | Alice Notley The cat’s eye marble is green. One sandal. Shade. If I were a girl from the Sagamon River, or if I am. I then turned to the page called Free. The wind in my hair & the church in my head & the reticence of. No I haven’t been waiting. Expression of engine of an intimate clime It must still be love which I talk. But you see. Shaky as pale lavender ones. High talk to cure an old tired fear. There’s an old plastic coffee cup in the forest of the lemon tree. But what I mean is. White oleanders in sky attached to leaves. If you love me, all of nature, let the wind blow.
May 21, 2025 at 3:17 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
suddenly the barred owl we’ve heard all spring appears
Photograph of barred owl perched in a tree, staring intently at the camera. Its feathers are white and grey/brown.
May 19, 2025 at 9:46 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
I’m haunted by this cormorant off the beach the other day.
A cormorant on a pier, wings extended. A cormorant on a pier, wings extended.
April 27, 2025 at 9:36 PM
chaswriter.bsky.social
A favorite Robert Hass poem.
To A Reader | Robert Hass I’ve watched memory wound you. I felt nothing but envy. Having slept in wet meadows, I was not through desiring. Imagine January and the beach, a bleached sky, gulls. And look seaward: what is not there is there, isn’t it, the huge bird of the first light arched above first waters beyond our touching or intention or the reasonable shore.
April 26, 2025 at 5:21 PM