‘From the furnace of a star’

Saint Joseph's Abbey, in Spencer Mass., a Trappist monastery.

— Photo by John Phelan

“The monastery is quiet.  Seconal

drifts down upon it from the moon.

I can see the lights

of the city I came from,

can remember how a boy sets out

like something thrown from the furnace

of a star…. ‘‘

— From “The Monk’s Insomnia,’’ by Denis Johnson (1949-2017), an American poet. This came from the book Mountain Interval: Poems from the Frost Place, 1977-1986. The Frost Place, in Franconia, N.H., is a museum and poetry center dedicated to Robert Frost, who lived there with his family full time from 1915 to 1920, as he was becoming famous, and then summered there until 1940.

— Photo by Mfwills