Threat
He thumbs a corner of Verlaine, plucks those pages like a dulcimer, even when the train lurches not looking up from there but pawing at the air for a handhold, and my God! what a head— stamped from some stuff…
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Upper Peninsula Woods, September 1971
From White Out , a memoir “Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep.” -Hamlet My Dad puts the gun in my hands. The barrel is cold. Cold like a rock you lay across in winter before it snows. But it’s autumn now. The trees all around…
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Origins: Lost Traces
“If it is true that there is an origin of language and if it is true that the origin of language is other to the uttered experience of language, then the origin is irreparably lost and unreachable.” —Paolo Bartoloni I. It was snowing that day. A scree of snow fell against a sky so white…
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How You Came To Be
Swear you’ll go as deep as you possibly can, my wife said before I set out on the submarine voyage. I promised her and donned my gear. The paparazzi followed me down, but one by one they drowned. Starfish nibbled at their flesh and little bubbles rose cheerfully, heralding their demise. I was too busy…
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Ringstraked
The morning Jacob called us to the field and said he would take us back to the land of his father, Isaac— the one led up the mountain by his father to be bound and knifed and burnt for love of the god of his fathers, I thought, I will not. I would stay, I…
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Old Flame
I saw him once in all these years, walking up the steep hill from the bus stop, past my parents’ house, on his way home to the house where he lived with his wife. I was outside on the lawn that day with my two boys, interfering in one of their arguments, separating them while…
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On the Famish
What shall we call it when we’re sexually starving? I never liked the word "horny"; it’s trivializing and more than a little rhinocerean. Also too front heavy to be used for women. The old-fashioned phrase "on the lurch" sounds rude: monstro-comically (courtesy of The Addams Family) redolent both of lurching forward and being left in…
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*between the lines
In between “host” and “glint” is ghost. A “hint” will hiss next to “guess.” For example also the virtue of frost is moisture And in icicles, glaciers or in a body’s cooling gestures the centuries pile up. Bone too, keeps a ballad interior. Lacuna if it could speak would be laconic. Winter seethes and wrecks us,…
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Buck and Doe
Bill held the knife. I held the book. "Cut a slit from the deer’s breastbone to the anus, taking care not to puncture the bladder," I read. My fingers stiffened in the wind. Steam rose off the guts as they hit the driveway. The moon shone off the snow. He had me hold a hoof….