At first you were famously not good at it. You were coaxed, given cocoa, lectured a bit. On the morning of a journey they would gather you up And bundle you into the station wagon, asleep Or pretending sleep, among pillows and soft voices, While the car made its turnings through darkened places. Later you…
After Samuel died and I had to move up north to live with Faith and her husband Dan, I got rid of almost everything I owned. Not that I wanted to, but there was no space in their drafty house near the river for their things and my things too. I really only had a…
As for the fly I chased around the bathroom with a towel that night, swatting, slapping, thrashing, pounding, kicking with one foot the toothbrush cup onto its side, dislodging the tea curtain with a misplaced elbow, unable for all my efforts to terminate his gallant loops and arabesques, his beeline dives and fighter-pilot vectorings, his…
Homo Fictus…is never conceived as a creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Strange, how rarely it’s a topic. Yet how we cherish that dark, soothing lake water beneath our chattery reflexive surfaces. “Already,” a story has it, “she seemed to be fishing in…
a white-trunked white- limbed white-leafed tree white petals sepals white stamens pistils bees inside a white woman pure white body skin hair white eyes white lips nipples blood white grass for the white stones of this white dream
“Is anything—not even happiness but just not torment—possible? No, nothing!” she answered herself now without the least hesitation. “…All efforts have been made; the screw is stripped.” —Anna in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina “She’s writing a book for children and doesn’t tell anybody about it, but she read it to me, and I gave the…
A psychological experiment was once performed on horses. Each animal had been taught to stamp a hoof four times, say, when the trainer called out that number. The horses that got the number right were rewarded with a carrot or cube of sugar. But for experiment’s sake, the trainers periodically denied the horses their rewards…
carried a baby heart in my pocket neat pink packet that kept beating a quiet music or calling machine with no reception except in my hand that reached from time to time in my pocket and cradled that only connection to what might have been or was it to what might be
Pit yourself against gutted ships, against the lips of those you love the least, against the hollows where quails spend their lives. Do not sleep. Do not take shape. Ambush the soft armies of seas and the singular face of an adjacent cliff. Scream the way everything screams. Find a small longitude to stitch along…
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