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For dermatology, for the betterment Of medical science, Joseph Towne produced Over five hundred models of skin disease, Forming those faces from beeswax and resin, Applying disease with spatulas and knives— Lesions and rashes, pustules, and the chancres Of unchecked syphilis, especially those On faces disfigured by heredity, Bad luck, or unwisely satiated lust, An…

Below this knoll a man kneels. Face close to the earth, he works soil like a potter works clay, kneading and shaping until hands slowly open, reveal a single green stalk before he palms himself up the row as if he hauls on his back morning’s sun-sprawl, a bringer of light he cannot bring here…

I hear a generator buzz, I taste those days, citronella swirled with cardboard meals and ice unlimited, and the welcome thrill of Katrina’s king cake dolls, half-ounce bottles of Tabasco packed with MREs marked “Chicken Fajitas.” People thought our food was special made, a little heat singing to the tongue of home, but I knew…

       1. Once more. My obligation to my mind requires that I speak in the only way it understands.—This time, of the oldest tree remembered, the garden oak in its mysterious well which utters still, each spring—after winter and all its snows—new branches, and on them leaves. Then flowers—and, then its proper seeds, each acorn in…

They know how to stay in one place. Each year a circle: no need for photos or taxes. They are dressed for the weather, never stuck inside on a lively day. Tongues of green light: their voices made of wind. To climb one is to leave the peopled world behind. They cast such shadows: big…

Were the earth a skull, the lump at its base would read to Victorian doctors as amativeness: connubial love, procreative lust. And where the peninsula stretches up toward Patagonia a smidge of philoprogenitiveness, parental love, a fondness for pets and the generally helpless. Jules Dumont d’Urville, man of his times, had his own skull mapped…

You’ve got to have a little faith in people, the girl says, blinking tears. She’s seventeen, the wise, shy center of a film where couple after couple split, East Side lovers blown round an unending storm, while past them whirl parks, cafés, planetariums. The screen (she’s sobbing) swears by Woody Allen’s smile like lead anchoring…

“I think you think I don’t know who you are,” she says at the window, “but I know what I know.” She sits across her tiny, white, bizarre, and sterile room, watching the falling snow. He stares at the half-done puzzle on the floor: Escher’s Waterfall, just more confusions for someone seldom coherent anymore, being…

In the same week that John F. Kennedy, Jr., with wife Caroline and her sister Lauren, crashed his private plane into the sea, a Kentuckian who worked for Tyson Foods— which gave big money to President Bill Clinton, who led the mourning for JFK, Jr.—fell into, not a vat, vat sounds undignified, like in that…