If the express should slow and then suddenly stop and sit utterly still for minutes on end and all talk stop and no one question the stillness, no voice announce what, if anything, is about to transpire (odd word, that, for me, “transpire,” out of Latin “to go out into breath” or air or nothing),…
We three brothers spent the afternoon outside in the haze and half rain. We trekked the empty field out behind the decommissioned paper mill where our father used to work and we were fallen upon by ashes from Mount St. Helens, which had erupted three days ago, and once more two days after. Though the…
I’m surviving, Walter said. There was sun and those small birds that Rome is full of in March. There were daisies coming up in the grass and a line of olives and Walter Meltort, the art historian, was on the phone to New York. We’ve finished the morning round of papers. We’ve had lunch. Now…
Nothing moves me further away toward a mathematical horizon,completely abstract, like an oar-less boat on a perfectly still bodyof endless water, as when you speak to me in the fifty languagesof nowhere. Though I have no answer, everything tastes like snow,a mineral sulk on the tongue, the essence of winter locked in everymolecule. The wooly…
Tonight this silver plane is permitted to bear me in its belly through a black wipe of sky. And in the evil of my pride, I get to forget I am You-formed—needlework of hair …
A white cat, paranoid, inquisitive, stalks night in circles around a white van with a shiv of silver on its front. There’s something secret in the wheel-well. Her lovely feline shoulders roll as she paws it, cocks her wild-eyed head at me, pretends to play with leaf rot piled around the tire. The dumb alluring…
Some mornings, his father floats at the foot of the stage and asks him to sing. He knows it is a ghost, a made airy thing. He knows nothing, no holler or raw shriek, keeps his father out of ether. Come, his shit-scared rage song goes, crawl into bed, weight this body down. But the…
The butterfly is solar-powered; it floats around the clearing, where the light is strong. When it comes to the perimeter of shade, it turns, and glides back into the clearing. It doesn’t use more energy than it requires, and we have never seen a butterfly that kept on growing bigger and bigger, from the size…
Gustave Caillebotte, c. 1872 Say “canal” and there’s that final vowel Towing silence with it, slowing time To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still. The stunted concrete mocks the classical. Water says, “My place here is in dream, In quiet good standing. Like a…
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