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There, in the same spot as the annihilation of the world, love of existence stood. We walked along. In boulevard windows: plates, hat-like napkins set for the imaginary meal. Each act of revenge has love as a twin but could art convey this without violence? In this parabola, I recalled the little dragon in the…

Stories come to us like new senses a wave and an ash tree were sisters they had been separated since they were children but they went on believing in each other though each was sure that the other must be lost they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of as family resemblances features they…

A solitary clock behind bars, floors forbidden to street shoes, exit signs— one, two, three, four: fine—& waxy cries of boys, one mine, practicing their dribbling & bank shots. My eyes closed, the volley of Spaldings pounds like opening night of Operation Desert Storm, or Shield, or whatever war our Sonys dust up next ….

“Like one man milking a billy goat another holding a sieve beneath it,” Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient. It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesn’t matter. In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk. One morning finding pudding and a washed pot, another the opened drawers of her late husband’s dresser. After…

Shucking corn on the veranda, my sister said she didn’t care that her father had dropped by, or that I’d finally met him. Later, after the dark started to rake in, I found her outside again, staring at the sweep of fallow fields and shadows around our mother’s rented house, the curious row of weathered…

High noon in autumn And another ovulation Of sun on its way Down the blue tube of the sky, Then out the west through red leaves. Newly awakened, With first hairs turning silver, She never conceived Any leaves could look so red Or heat her with their color. One has to wonder What she feels…

If I was a real guy, said my friend Jason, and I got an e-mail like that, what would you do? Someone had told him he was a big sexy dreamboat and he was trying to figure out if he should buy a sports car and a condom or take an Alka-Seltzer and go to…

In college I loved Browning’s phrase— was it in “Two in the Campagna”?— “tangled ropes of lasagna” and even today I think it may have been pasta which civilized the Italians so much they refused to fight for Mussolini—remember how Marshall Badoglio’s armies surrendered in Africa tutti and rapidamente?—and even the names make you smile:…

Rain spills leaf to leaf, rips some down the chilly greenblack air, falls and falls until it tamps October’s ripened ground that sponges up big plans. Sheet lightning popped across the water and rubbed things raw. The rain’s tinny cymbal-brushing rushes our nerves—we’ll live how long to hear it? Eighty today, Gracey on the back…