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. ….
Photographic Exhibit at the Parthenon Centennial Park, Nashville Black-and-white, their faces and clothes could come from almost any era I've studied in school or seen blazoned on late-night TV. Two women wear bedspreads as shawls. A man washes his armpits with water collected in someone's cracked bowl, using a hamburger wrapper to dry them. Most…
L.A. in the morning wash, the sea not wine-dark, but purple, the almost doleful splendor of the breakers in the haze lulling everyone awake, the surfers, boards on heads, padding down some suburban street in calm and stately procession as if acting out some ritual, some homage to the sun brought to heel in Santa…
I wonder where it is we belong when daybreak rumples your new coat, and pleasant is a word that rhymes with buckle? I've been more or less unbuckling into the late afternoon. I've been hurt by your excursions, not knowing the Chinese word for go. There are stuffed animals with words written along their bodies,…
for E.W. Not so much written as spliced together bit by discrete bit, Craig Raine's "In the Kalahari Desert" unfolds before us like some campy newsreel. It plays off the genre clichés of missionary accounts-the broken axle, the heat, the vultures, the reading of requisite verses from the Good Book-against a precise and peculiar set…
Today the world will be enough. You will devote yourself to the six essential colors, balancing the motion of these wheels the two coaches lock in place. Face to face, one red-paneled, one green-coiffed, foreground, background, they wait together holding down the violet earth yawning beneath them, the shadows of abyss. And the sky, a…
A man carries his wife through the street, a plaster cast from toes to knee. A bicycle plods by with pigs for saddlebags. Another is hauling a sofa. Another, a basket of writhing eels. Another, goose eggs, enough for a season of no-hitters. Another, a dozen homemade crutches. I am bringing a box of used…
moonglow soft as milk on the old stones and the dreams below moored on flowing water in the far corner a bamboo hut in the open doorway two burning coals the voices float on smoke. . . . . . . .a muffled cough the silken scrape of jade balls turning in the calloused palms…
You have lost weight from the days of walking And are up before others in the house To step through mist and rhododendron bulking The path that winds down to the lake. Curlews Flash and cry and skim the stippled surface. The leaves, the scattered movement of the leaves, And then, again, a stillness resembling…
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