I shall speak of the tendency among sane and healthy persons to seeimages flash unaccountably into existence. —Francis Galton This is a tale not of science but of blue. Some say this heat is the worst in history, but history is huge and Idoubt it has never been hotter across the Northern peninsula. Still, the bears…
My mom says my dad had to work so hard he didn’t really notice how angry it made him. Nowadays he can’t watch the news without losing his temper. He comes from country people who hated the government going all the way back to the revolution. My mom says my dad’s grandfather used to talk…
Sadie’s lover, Marcus, called her every Thursday from Chicago as he drove to and from marriage counseling. (His wife drove separately, it goes without saying.) The end result of this was that it felt as if the three of them were in counseling together, but Sadie sort of liked that. The reason Marcus had to…
Marked by Apollo with a red coin on the forehead, this one still waits, solitary, uncoupled on extraordinary legs, not gull-like or chicken-like, not tree-clinging or perching. He dreams a wet return to the sand flats and shallowsof the Blackjack Peninsula, of flying over lands with mutual wing easing their flight as in Paradise Lost….
In late summer I swim across the lake to the stand of reedswhich grows calmly in the foot-deep water on the other side. It is like going to a florist’s shopyou have to take your clothes off to get to, where nothing is for sale and nothing on displaybut some tall, vertical green spears, and…
(A small, and still isolated, incident inNew York shows what can happen if authenticauthority in social relations has broken downto the point where it cannot work any longereven in its derivative, purely functional form.A minor mishap in the subway system—thedoors on a train failed to operate—turnedinto a serious shutdown on the line lastingfour hours and involving more than fiftythousand passengers because when thetransit authorities asked the passengers toleave the defective train, they simply…
Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in the swish of a swift moving blade that slit her dreams in halfand sent her father strollingacross the cane field like a land-bending river, turning a page she could…
The kind Italian driver of the bus to Romeinvited her to his house—she was obviouslyhungry—and gave her sandwichesand raped her. All those years ago—she smileswhile telling it—contemptuous,somehowof her younger self, who drags behind her like a can.Grammar is greatbut who will write the sentence that includesthe story of the damage to her soul and how…
Along a familiar hiking trail I recognizeagave, sage, the summer-blooming yucca,and sticky monkey flower. *As if they might be learning a new dance,elders plant their feet on steady ground,gathering wind in their arms to move cloud hands. *Returning home tonight I avoid crushinga snail that casts a scant shadowon the wide sidewalk in clear light of a…
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