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Things that can turn to shrapnel: Steel and stone. Crockery. Wood. Glass. And bone.

Here, take it, my mother would say, unwinding a scarf from her neck, slipping off a bracelet, a ring too small for my finger she tried to force anyway. A giver, a couldn’t-hold- on-to-it, my mother was. She would give you, as they say, the shirt off her back—and ours. My father’s three-piece suit and…

A row of lights behind the valence lets down warm loops of plummy color, matte with dust, but even in light, deep folds of shadow stand like a forest, hiding the whispering players. We of the audience chatter and shift as we wait for the curtains to open, keeping our eyes on the empty apron,…

Venice, 1448 Installed in a high wooden pulpit, the professor Drones on aloud from his book, was it Stephen of Antioch’s spin on Abbas’ translation of Galen the Greek? The music of it all, anyway, the muscular rhythms, Phrase knit to phrase with the delicate Sinew of assonance—! The students in the foreground milling about,…

That’s what my mother called her dimestore pads of Irish Linen, each sheet with its trace of red gum threaded along the top, thumbed off for elegance. For special, she’d say, to be used for letters, not lists, to be used to write about the weather one day at a time. But she got only…

we do not know the name of the river that roils beneath us until we arrive at its shores—until we give reason to pass along or stay there where waters sound like uncut jewels swirling in a tide pool—until the little boats we’ve made fold like kites in a storm—until we’ve come to that point…