Article

It Gets a Little Hazy About Now

The years in Cuba are behind me now.Little spotted dogs, like tiny archangelsfollowed me around. I smelled of saltand palm oil. Given the nature of belief, the effectiveness of the divine will,unforgettable and strictlyfor the birds, I could be saidto be out of touch. I read Aeschylus— the diaries—Othello on the Beach,and Peter Gunn. I…

Pastoral

Every garden dreams of being Eden: rosebushes or wildflowers, it hardly matters as long as the hum of bees remains peaceable and the door to the grave stays hidden beneath a swath of grass. In the cooling afternoon each flower relaxes on its pedestal of stem, and the gardener too dreams, under a tree weighted…

Where Do Your Poems Come From?

           For Karen and Aria                In the Namib fat sand rats saunter through              all the continents of their own personal deserts I started this poem thinking about Orpheus, because I am always thinking about Orpheus, strumming as the dead stir              all the while, looking for death’s hawk-shaped smear,              looking for amaranth seeds small as the…

Traveling Light

I’m only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I’ll be gone forever— the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I’d need for an eternity of traveling light. I’ve left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and…

Introduction

Sometimes when I’m asked to account for my weirdness—by those sympathetic enough to have not given up on me—I remember that Edward Gorey responded to the same request by remarking that the first two books he remembered reading as a child were Alice in Wonderland and Dracula, and so I offer my own origins story,…

Marriage, East Berlin

I. It came in like a quiet boat at night. We still don’t know who sent it or why. Some days it makes us shake. We kept on cooking for each other and bathing ourselves. We looked at children but the music of Chopin always replaced the sight of them. In its coming, it took…