That there is no it, only is. —Richard Ford Two days ago, the sun Was a white stone in the leaden sky, The black-eyed Susans looked up And fell back wilted, just as I wilted And retreated to the air conditioner. Today a breeze has flowed from the northwest, It’s 28 degrees cooler, And I…
Red houses, white houses, drawing our curtains against the spectacle of each other washing dishes and trimming the dog’s nails. Now and then we exchange news. Life’s gotten harder, easier, nobody this week has tied a noose in the master bedroom, or watched his bed flame on the lawn. Nobody in a black auto pulls…
As they loaded the dead onto the gurneys to wheel them from the university halls, who could have predicted the startled chirping in those pockets, the invisible bells and tiny metal music of the phones, in each the cheer of a voiceless song. Pop mostly, Timberlake, Shakira, tunes never more various now, more young, shibboleths…
She’s already fallen twice, first breaking the left hip when she misses a step at the beauty parlor, then her right in a tumble at her old house in Arizona. It’s in this precarious condition that my mother comes back into my life. When her second husband dies, it falls on me, as her only…
The twist of the stream was inscrutable. It was a seemingly run-of-the-mill stream that flowed for several miles by the side of Route 302 in northern Vermont— and presumably does still—but I’ve not been back there for what seems like a long time. I have it in my mind’s eye, the way one crested a…
Coming to scrub the fourth corner, chip loose paint off cement stuck with old stones, I wonder who wrote in pencil ace, yummy!—and why? Yesterday, pushing a broom into the struts under the stairs, I clinked on an old bottle of bath oil, labeled in deco style. Thirty years in this house. I’ve touched the…
A fire has started in the kitchen, and is moving from room to room. There’s just enough time to save the Rembrandt, an original, or the portrait of your wife. You save the Rembrandt, of course, but when you get outside you think it might be possible to save the portrait as well. You dash…
He lies as still as possible and waits, then opens up his eyes. They’re everywhere. Millions, billions of motes, dead as the fates, hovering in the shafts of the morning air. Detritus of the universe, debris, the cosmic dust, polluted, dying, and dead, an endless sinking suffocating sea of sunlit dust that pins him to…
Let the watchers admit to the terror of being young, and the writers set down on blackboards their fear. It is the people’s right to ask exile or blood, the people’s privilege to eat the cheapest food. While the talk of guns worms into the dreams of the citizens, every schoolyard is the same. Salomé…
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