I began naming my children when I was four. The habit launched itself via the succession of dolls that were quickly discarded, and the numerous stuffed animals exhausted from affection. There were also objects like the secondhand family car and the rubber plant. Sometimes I named tools like pencils, or apparel like shoes. Naming was…
To Alex"s personal horror and professional embarrassment, the Clement College alumni magazine ran an obnoxiously chipper blurb that September, in a special, blue-tinted box. She read it out loud to Malcolm on the phone: Fowl Play Assistant Professor Alex Moore has taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge"s "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" quite a few times since…
Then, he held me there as if stunned, the figure who had appeared saying this is the edge between what is and what is not. On one side was the forest in all its complex depth and verdancy, on the other side stretched the field, …
I’m tired of silence, its flimsy eloquence, I’m tired of the tawdry quirks of speech (a taste of compromise, a smarmy diligence, a disaffection for what’s not in reach); I’m tired of the exactions of desire, flailing, jockeying to get expressed. I’m tired of sickness, of its cure, tired of restlessness, tired of rest. I’m…
Bone dry river. Red sand where the water once ran. Boulders that were stepping stones. No cattle. The wind is never gentle here, merely patient—the mesas could tell you that. The vast fields of scrub grass where nothing we’ve planted ever takes root. The way the rain floods everything and is gone, is like kindness…
1. Kissinger in black-tie shuffles to the town car idling at the museum complex edge between where the glum Pei pyramid rises and the gardens begin. “Is that—” I say, and “Yes,” says Jim, baby in his arms, me shoving the empty stroller to get home by naptime. Nobody notices, clicking at each other through…
I watched you walking up out of that hole All day it had been raining in that field in Southern Italy rain beating down making puddles in the mud hissing down on rocks from a sky enraged I waited and was patient finally you emerged and were immediately soaked you stared at me without love…
I love poets who bring us to our proper size. Think about taking a picture of a mile-high waterfall, and about that little human figure you need in the shot to suggest the magnitude caught in the image—the tiny person is the scale factor. It isn’t that true scale diminishes the human, but rather that…
my father said, when Jacob enters the tent, until it is accomplished. I did not believe it would be accomplished. What thief does not know trickery when it comes courting, hands full of daughters, and sheep, and savoury meat? Yet he came into the tent in the dark, full of intention and heat. My body…
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