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Last night I dreamed I was in Mexico. I saw my ex-wife’s—second wife’s—hacienda. I saw her dead husband dancing with Indians. He’d lost weight because he couldn’t eat. “The stitches in my stomach have popped open!” he cried. The bartender said, “There’s nothing I can do about it,” But you could tell by the tone…

The trees leaning into one another, green and horrible, The sun setting at the end of the street, The birds’ voices of despair and lust, Even a fool could tell you what this is all about, How one person sits in his car and waits And the air thickens and browns—pollen and dust. The world…

First you were windowed, then windowless. Window-rich, then poor. They did it with such finesse, for a moment you thought to thank them, the way your graceless limbs with a dancer’s grace made art of the artless air. Nothing original here. Think of those two whose flailings shattered sky. Who later praised the benevolent courtyard…

I want to stick a needle in the veins of leaves and extract the chlorophyll. I want to stick needles into the arms of everything and concentrate what I find there. To retreat to the familiars. To the comforts of my neighborhood, where everybody really hates me. Like I’m the bus that passes by, ignoring…

The beautiful American word “guy.” It always gets me. For one thing, a guy is never alone. What if your name were Guy? Then you’d think that all the men behind all the deli counters on Ninth Avenue were talking to you. “What’ll it be, Guy?” “Mayo, Guy?” “We’re outta sesame, Guy, how about onion?”…

—peasant proverb invoked by St. Joan at her trial So I lied & I fled & I prized up the floorboards where necessary, yes. For it was May then & the bells, I kneeling in the light they made & would forever have. But the lily was a sword with a cross inside it, a…

Victorians surrounding it, the place is just a storefront restaurant that seats about a dozen people; strange, to taste roast pork that’s drenched in mojo, yuca frites, and milkshakes of mamey this far up North. Outside, if they were still alive, I might expect my grandparents to pass, the force of their unending exile not…

—The New York Times, October 1, 1995   I imagine him behind a desk big as a Buick, irked the administration’s blocked his hydroelectric or plastics factory scheme, and the idea, unsummoned, arrives in his mind: the President’s head gone in a cloud of blood. And then the police are there. They smoke his cigarettes…

Here are some sentences of distinctive American prose from our era. From a combination of hypersensitivity and a desire not to know the truth in case it turned out to be unpleasant, I had spent the last ten months putting off a confrontation with John Mitchell. . . . I listened to more tapes. ….