The sandhogs who blasted the Lincoln Tunnel jerry-rigged an escarpment a quarter-mile down but it buckled at riptide and one journeyman was sucked into the air pocket, up through the lattice, through the ooze under the Hudson, to surface in daylight—how the hell did he remember to drop his ninety pound jute sack and let…
The summer I turn forty I pretend I am still young enough to sit with my college self at the library before disappearing in a field of smoke. Don’t my jeans still fit? Can’t I see without glasses if I just hold the book a little farther from my face? Then, hiking with my daughter,…
The summer I raised orphaned songbirds in Wisconsin, the spare room in my house was scattered with plastic laundry baskets, each containing one berry box lined with tissue. Every twenty minutes, I walked from basket to basket, offering a needle-less syringe of soupy formula to the nestlings I’d placed in the berry boxes. If the…
Kenya, Africa. Africa! Nine thousand miles from Portland. My wayward son Tim walks toward me with four tall, dark-as-midnight women. He has seen me, I’m quite sure of it, but nothing about his gait changes. He arrives at the tent and doesn’t say a word, or make any motion toward me. The thirty or so…
Here is the paint-by-numbers painting of Sitting Bull’s pony she painted. Here is her imitation Navajo loom she used to weave turquoise blankets. Here is her afternoon martini shaker and the prescription Black Beauties. Mahjong tiles click rhythmically by arthritic hands of her bilingual generation. Outside the rain rains sideways, horizontal as this world is,…
Here in this little town in Pennsylvania where I spend half the week and the whole long summer, we are urged to buy local. This is a pleasure, not a duty or a difficulty. The rewards are multiple: sticking it to the multinationals, high quality merchandise, real personal exchanges. Becoming known. The place in town…
They drink their cocktails in the calm manner of their middle years, while the dim lights around the swimming pool make shadows of that world they’ve almost fully entered. Like Yeats’ wild swans their uneven number suggests at least one of them is no longer mated. Added up, their several ages are short of a…
Mrs. Greed had been married for forty years, her husband the cuckold of all time. A homely man with a notable fortune, he escorted her on errands in the neighborhood. It was a point of honor with Mrs. Greed to say she would never leave him. No matter if her affection for him was surpassed…
Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing, On TV the Bizarre Foods host leans over a rickety market stall in Bangkok. He picks at the toothpick bones of a sparrow, licks his lips and…
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