She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…
At thirty-nine each apple reminds me of some other. The memory lives in objects: fallen from trees or baked like pie. I kiss my daughter and remember my own face kissed. All Broadway music is from a play I saw with my father when his eyes were fine. Certain words or smells evoke the faces…
I don’t believe in ghosts though I’ve seen milk-steam wandering a darkened room. I don’t believe a big mind regards all sparrows though I admire the faithful, how crossing a street or a continent of trouble they seem confident and frank as stars. Cranky and cratered, I maneuver like a moon of bright remarks. In…
On a rainy day in Claremont, California, you might find B. H. Fairchild drafting a poem and drinking a double espresso in the second seat of the front window of Some Crust Bakery. Other days, you might find him writing in a little place behind his garage. Officially, "B. H." stands for "Bertram Harry," a…
We thought: after us there will be a blue moth flying jaggedly sideways. Round dusty sparrows will peck indignantly at the stone sill. There will still be rolling clouds and their shadows on Altamira will fold in steep valleys. After us, there may also be lovers, stripping and trembling, bargaining with the air between two…
The turning of the pages of a magazine in the middle of a morning sends waiting-room echoes through the quiet house, echoes that are making us old. The routines that hold us closer to them and this sense that steady notice is being taken of us somewhere now, this is making us old and the…
We’ll never know for sure now, you in your garage with the motor on and the tailpipe clogged and the door closed, three days before the trial. Your wife found you after she found the note, and this morning the numinous beauty of low fog in our field has taken on a strange gloom, a…
First just a few, then more, then more— this one a gift, this one a pity adoption. They flutter as she passes. They call when she comes home. She strokes them, soothes them. They flap, agitated. She tries to nap, but their cries are constant. They are starving. They will not be placated. She says…
They glowed, the first day after their wedding, like planets in the morning sky, and their movements, no matter the task—packing gifts, choosing deli sandwiches, examining the map—were stately and serene. The second day, in the car, she said she was homesick. For their wedding, of all things. "It went too fast." He lifted a…
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