I am sitting behind a desk, not my desk, maybe your desk, watching the clock. That woman who works in the next cubicle has her radio tuned to NPR. “All Things Considered” has come on. This is good, this means that we are getting toward the end of things. The work day, I mean. On…
Codices, caxtons, concordances— your books, dusted, rearranged, reshelved. But it’s what falls out of them most fascinates: feathers, letters, fortunes, tickets, baseball, post- and birth- day cards stashed among the savored or as-yet-unfinished pages. What would get you back to that one? A prison term perhaps, or the long convalescence you have sometimes thought you…
In this house that is not mine I hear a home knocking at a door left unlocked for years only the days knew to come and go as they please. At the top of some ridge it has found me with my walls building solitude out of trees. At the nadir of some work it…
The summer I first discovered how it feels to suffer in love, I worked for a local newspaper, selling subscriptions over the phone. It was a miserable job, and I was lousy at it. I stumbled through my script, apologizing too often, agreeing with people on the other end of the line that it was…
After the second act blacks out, you head to the lobby, to feel the crowd stream around you, bearing secret energies, as through water heaves a sullen wave, as through the flag speaks a jubilance of wind. When you stop near a table of brochures, a fat, sunburned boy looks (instantly sizing you) up and…
Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man—wow—I love how The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning His hip to the right, kind of messy Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle And a hip cocked in the…
“Ma’am? You can’t open the windows, sorry.” Coolly she turned to the boy. Prissy Mexican kid, wearing white-boy wire-rim glasses, who’d brought up her single lightweight suitcase she’d have preferred to have brought herself, to save a tip. But at the hotel check-in downstairs the suave, brisk young woman behind the counter had finessed Kathryn,…
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…
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…
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