First the good news: In spite of every dour pronouncement I’ve heard over the four decades I’ve called myself a writer, and probably going even farther back, literature as we know it is not in crisis. Reading is not obsolete. Books are not doomed. Print is not archaic, nor is it likely to become so….
Let the light beyellow but not enough to stingthe eye, close enough to turnoff morning candle-lit, quiet,incandescent, enough to seebeside, clear after morning,to burn on not cold yetnot quite bright enough to readby, and just near absentmindedlyeach night
…even if all the animals are oracles, I don’t want to have a bee under my pillow, even if it’s just a sign of the druidic image of community, even if it signifies the solar dance of the bee replicating the hive of the many in the streets or the village, signified clairvoyants of ultraviolet…
Her family moved to town from Omaha on Christmas Eve. Her father and mother are the new managers of the Sherman Ice Arena, which, thanks to the coal-baron millionaire who owns it, is open all year. It is mid-January now, skating season. Half the town goes to the public skate on Saturday afternoon, the experience…
Greet the walker, walkingin with the shadow of the hood shooing away the emphatic light.First cold night the blinds flicker down, each vinyl stripa white notion near as wide. August, gone, feels gone.The woman in another room, ever without honeymoon,hits snooze and spreads her hair behind her like the patchof hillside shade I’ve come to…
and I keep in touch with you’re pissing me off you’re pushing my buttonsI’m not interested in rescheduling Listen! Do you hear that? That’s my tongue licking a laceration, a bloody metacarpal, a fracture; that’s my nasal baritone, my UUUUUU unfurling your foothold. Wolves keep in touch, and I with my keen sense sense extirpation…
Rusty Bickers went walking through the fields at dusk, Rusty Bickers with a sadness and nobility that only Joseph could see. Joseph dreamed of Rusty Bickers at the kitchen table, eating Captain Crunch cereal before bedtime, his head low, lost in thought; Rusty Bickers, silent but awake beneath the blankets on his cot, his hands…
A blackish hueclustered at our heels. You were in the mixed woodswhich meant I was in the same mixed woods. I kicked up the floor. Needleslittered the lower air in standing dust, our shadows dotting the dirt moundsloped unnecessarily away. I peeled backin drying nut husks, upturned trunks of living trees,massive, deeply split. A bird…
They are big fans of horror film.In the fading light of a November afternoon,The gray surface of a pondLooks like a movie screen to them. The moving branches reflected in itAre like the fingers of the blindGroping to touch the face of someoneWho’s been calling out to them In the voice of geese flying overhead,The…
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