There’s a preponderance of dog shit in Paris but no one says so, attracted to its other, finer qualities. If people were stepping in that much crap in Detroit you’d never hear the end of it. Motown my ass, they’d say, without so much as a backward glance at the Miracles, the Temptations. They might…
It was more than a year since the bombings, but the rates were still very good. The travel agent who handled his business trips had arranged it all in a matter of minutes, and Leo and his wife would step foot on the island less than seventy-two hours after the idea had first come to…
Viareggio bus station, Italy He lifts him like they’re wrestlers in the ring or like in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus, only neither of these guys is a hero and both have been drinking all morning—this isn’t the Uffizi and what they’re doing isn’t in a painting: it’s a park, James Taylor’s going to sing tonight…
A man and a woman in bed at night breathe in, breathe out earthly pleasure, crunch of red clay beneath my shoes when I take the gravel path past the old dairy through the hillside pasture. Midwinter provides another meaning, by which I mean that other, more elusive, pleasure I know when I see, first,…
to address mystery without being mysterious, never expecting anyone to know, speaking only for yourself but not be self-centered, conducting yourself as if your work mattered, never naming what you love, believing in truth– as who doesn’t?–and not trying to say something, not contenting yourself with saying nothing, to bow down, to hate nothing and…
My aunt sat with a drink, the afternoon lit on the sill and half of her beautiful face when she spoke of her first death. It happened after a storm. Silver rays formed beams on the sea through the gray clouds and the surf pounded the sandy stretches of the Jersey shore. A rip current…
Women are right: There must be meaning; and the meaning will die. Men are wrong: They suppose there can be a deathless meaning; or else that there can be joy without meaning. Women know the double truth: There must be meaning; and the meaning will die.
“Soft trees against blue sky.” That is how Mrs. Abernathy described it before she died. “A small barn bent further than my arthritic spine. A white clapboard house, a wood burning stove and a sink you could fall into and land in China.” The autopsy report said pneumonia. It might have included the thousand little…
Chainsaws at dawn beneath a slate gray winter sky as my neighbor’s work crew clear-cuts the small lot behind his house and next to mine, rhododendrons and forsythia, junipers and spruce, and the mass of prickly sweetbriar the cardinals like—despite the rising ground and collection of rocks he wants an expanse of lawn as smooth…
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