Death, in the orderly procession of random events on this gradually expiring planet crooked in a negligible arm of a minor galaxy adrift among millions of others bursting apart in the amnion of space, will, said Socrates, be either a dreamless slumber without end or a migration of the soul from one place to another,…
“Da molte stele mi vien questa luce” —Dante I. Sea Road, No Map I said to you I will die if I stay and you said Jesus we’ll die anyway. You spoke as if I did not exist. What world would have me? A ship.? She moves me on from impossible Ireland, the wrack of…
After two years in Europe, fighting in the war, Frederick returned to the family farm outside of Ipswich. It was June of 1945. People commented on how much he’d changed. His eyes, which had once been full of feeling, were now entirely empty of emotion. Looking into them was like staring at a desert or…
Under the smallest bentback cricket leg rotates this enormous planet attesting to a cosmic order, surface washed in light supposed to heal all wicked men: paralytics, lepers, those whose mouths are packed with pebbles, blind crows instead of stomachs, telltale signs of shame. In a field, a black hood over my head, I stood and…
The body is at home in time and space and loves things, how they come and go, and such distances as it might cross or place between the things it loves, and its own touch. But for you, soul, whom the body bred in error like some weird pearl, everything is wrong. Space is stone,…
Diane stands on the bar of the trapeze, pacing and gesturing nonchalantly as a professor lecturing on the ground might. We stand in a circle at her feet, self-conscious in our leotards. We look up hopefully, with awe…we are hoping that she can teach us to fly too. I suspect that as little girls we…
Wild mint at our door, honeysuckle, fragrant August wind shifting, dying—nectar, salt, all one breath. Dragonflies mating in the greeny shade of the tamarisk, their brief lives unfettered. On the shore tiny green-black mites, terns— and the calligraphic beach grasses yearning with the breeze like a printmaker’s lines. Sand-washed, sun-warmed fragments—“sea glass”: wines tossed—when?—from a…
Sure, there was the giant knife, and the quick, fat slice of cake in his right hand, but what always surprised me was the night into which he stole. Hard and purring. Luminous and thick. It seemed not a real place— pines and bluffs and crashing waves as if it were a symptom of his…
From Years Ago, a memoir Tory Fukada showed me how to crank the corners and I practiced, abandoning the graceful strokes of cursive she’d also taught for the bold design, which seemed meant to be carved but smoldered like a brand. Dozens whirled like pinwheels on the barbed-wire page. I loved the prickly maze, the…
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