Flying over many states, driving through many streets, I come to The Chapel in the Pines, where a film of your life shows our trunks bunched in at the crotch as we take turns burying each other in the sands of Far Rockaway, each standing by a mound, like archeologists discovering tombs, tombs of their…
Dispatched with a worn brush, the cursive writing of poet Xaian Shu possessed heroic spirit. His calligraphy’s balanced characters pointed to diligent study. Scholar, poet, Mi Fu’s idiosyncratic running characters wrote of living in peaceful times before the Mongols roared down from the north. His writing was described as a “sailboat in a gust of…
1. Hay What’s the Latin word for hayfield? Virgil’s mum in his instructive Georgics, though my neighbors talk of nothing but: how weeks of cool rain forced the upright grass— seed ready to burst from fuzzy heads too wet to cut, releasing to the wind goodness that should be stuffed above a stall, or pulled…
A hairy hand with mouth and eyes, I would say, and was that scuttling, that side-stepping jig, the furred upper legs bent at the joint in demi-plié, was it scurry or whisk, romance or menace, this tuft half-hid behind our garden shed door? Her dragline ensnarls like a gossamer kiss to my thinking, she’s thinking,…
Stabbed by the heron’s shadow as the bird planed above me on these flats, I am back in Taylorville, 1958, scratching the low-tide mud with Linc and his father, the Kaiser. “No future in oysters, boy.” The old man’s advising one or both of us to stay in school or else enlist in the Navy:…
How naughty to run the car with a hose Returning the fumes To the man in the car How lonely to sit in the fume-ridden car Alone on a Wednesday morning How silly to end with your head in a bag A white plastic bag The end of your life How awful to get the…
Kids in the Dumb Class weren’t allowed to enroll for French So instead we learned the difference between ser and estar. A yellow-haired midget father in a white suit cursed me for being In his family tent-yard, where I had wandered. He was my size. All a misunderstanding, we weren’t that stupid. I was earning…
A Romance Novel in Ten Short Chapters Chapter One One day—taken by the lilt of his wrists and the most beautiful hands she had ever seen on a man—she impetuously threw in her lot with a deaf and dumb mechanic who’d been deaf and dumb from birth. She fell in love as she was watching…
Color of a two-day new bruise, pored and faintly fuzzed like the pad of a dog’s paw. Skin so thin faucet water risks rubbing through to moony fruit, the shape and pitless-centered weight of testes. No stone, too malleable so, not a drupe. Dropped, it wobbles to find plumb center, comes to rest on star-shaped…
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