When I saw her in her urban kitchen—thin and smart in her charity-shop green dress—a glass wall was between uspolished spotless with some soft cloth of mistrust.All winter she’d lived up the hillin the gray house with the damp walls,the rains fading the fields. The snow—its ice-floe memories of Riga, darkness, home. The nights we’d…
I’ve watched this ultrasound so oftenI close my eyes and picture a daughter feathered with pixels,a putto’s skeleton. So here is a piece of art I own, a representationany impressionist would be proud of for it moves, though it doesn’t yetmove me. But I do return, so she has achieved what a painting wants:to be…
Before she told me, she let mefinish my dinner. I can still seethe pinkish cream sauceblossoming on the china. I didn’t know yet if I could walkwhen I pushed myself back from the table.This is what gets me:I didn’t throw the stained dish against the wall.I slipped the plastic from my wallet.I signed my name.No…
Why are people wearing antlers in the hospital cafeteria?—Because it’s Christmas, silly. Can’t you hear the sleigh bellsdrifting down like pesticide from all the hidden speakers? Mr. Johansson says he doesn’t get paid enough to wear a Santa hat,but everybody else just goes along with it. It’s winter, the elevators ding, the stunned relatives get off…
I go around and turn the pages—the newestnews—for the paralytics on the porch.At least the day isn’t hot yet. So saysonly a gleam in an old man’s eye. A beezeroes in for the kill. I roll the ladiesto the shady side. No one wants wordof war. They go for a strangled baby on page three,continued…
Now and again I get a whiff of something, the uneasy stillness before a hard and fast rain, and I can almost remember before, when I first moved in and the world was not yet fixed concretely beyond the edges of my skin. Poverty was novel then, even briefly thrilling and romantic, and it was…
After I finally got over my sense of being a character in a book, and the innocence had gradually drained out of me through the holes life punctured in my container, that’s when I finally had time to stoop down and look closely at the dry, exhausted-looking grass next to the sidewalk, blowing back and forth all…
do you remember that bumyou ran into in the bathroom of the Radissonwashing himself with a rag his clothes in a pilein the corner he must have been in his sixtiesall smiles and still retarded by his father’s rageoh this man he said the things he didto me and my mother you wouldn’t believethey made…
for Sangchen Tsomo Today it looks like a radiant darkness within the body and the sound of the dove in morning and evening and how the machine of my mind is never silent and how I pray for silence like a rain cloud combed through branches. Or the dove’s slow sound above last year’s grasses….
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