My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They have been imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place. My brothers are notorious. They do regular things, like wait. On my birthday they say my name. They will never forget my name. What is that knowledge? Is it…
When you visit the statue of Montaigne in Paris, you find him amidst overgrown greenery, almost sequestered in the bushes across from the Sorbonne, as if preferring, in bronze, the margin he chose in life. The first thing you notice is his shoe. Even at night, when I came upon him, the shoe emerges first,…
She had just won a major literary prize. She was slim, blond, and preposterously attractive. I was slim, blond, and preposterously awkward. Somehow I’d gotten into her poetry writing class as a first-semester freshman. I’d submitted a sonnet about a monk so consumed with sexual longing that he couldn’t pray. The monk was me, and…
for the Wu Tang Clan and 1992 Shaolin’s flowers, imperial and ready for slaughter. Bobby Digital wears the wings of the only saint he knows. Come blessed angel with your skull-cup of blood. Enter this chamber with your black sword and a streetcar full of flagging desire. When the children ask for water, give…
By the end of her thirties, Patricia Hampl had published two poetry collections and a critically acclaimed memoir. When a radio interviewer asked her what was next, she replied airily, “I have it in mind to work on fiction from now on.” What happened in the following years just goes to show that writers are…
1. According to the Talmud, only three sins in Jewish law are so serious they are forbidden under any circumstances, even to save a life. These are murder, idol worship, and adultery. But in many interpretations, there is a fourth sin, equal to, if not worse than, these: lashon hara—literally, “evil tongue.” It is said…
The Day of Pentecost came without the usual ladder of tongues. The spike, driven through our white-bread boned shirts into our bare melon hearts, remained dry. The locusts, slung low in the trees, remained in our breath. The prophet, robed in wind, remained lost in the wilderness. The scarves about our heads. Something like a…
“Sir, I am wondering—have you considered lately what happens in Hell?” No, I hadn’t, but I liked that “lately.” We were on our way from the San Francisco Airport to Palo Alto, and the driver for Bay Area Limo, a Pakistani American whose name was Niazi, was glancing repeatedly in the rearview mirror to check…
There are times I think the past is nothing more than a room attached to ours. We enter it a hundred times a day, argue with whoever’s there; we flatten a cowlick, move the vase, true the picture on the wall. I was looking out at the garden the other day (something I tend to…
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