For me, these past few years have been filled with elegies. Allow me one more: this, not for a loved one, but for the Plough & Stars, the Cambridge pub where this very journal was founded. Like much of the Cambridge that had welcomed (or ignored) me—a young writer who had come to town fifteen…
Every village has its rhythm, and every year Templeton’s was the same. Summer meant tourists to the baseball museum, the crawl of traffic down Main Street, even a drunken soprano flinging an aria into the night on her stagger back to the Opera. With fall, the tourists thinned out, and the families of Phillies…
The sun didn’t mind our handing the revolutions back from earth to itself, so we could say and believe once more, It rose this morning. We allowed the horizon’s gray clouds to decide on a pale cerulean sky. Many things we were taking back, giving some away. The Mississippi could keep its rolling on. Twittering…
April 1995 With his ear for a tune and facility with languages, Chaim Traum should have excelled at eavesdropping, but he did not. Something went wrong in the step between deciphering and understanding, a failure to move inside the conversation and string all the fragmented phrases together. His wife was more skilled. Through their daughter’s…
The teleology of what I now perceive. Contraction. Exile. The afternoon we paddled home in two canoes from the end of the lake, the sky programmatic and threatening, the seven of us eager to reenter the domestic space—the raindrops long as spoons, later the guinea pigs discovered huddled under the station wagon, the reformulation of…
Hank says: "Pan Am is run by the CIA, you know." He says: "There’s trouble brewing here. Out there." He points with his chin. "In the sugar cane fields. In the jungle." He says: "Hemingway knows. He knows all about it." Clara says nothing. She is thinking that she can’t even get this one thing…
from the world that called you Piñon not one voice is now not stopped Piñon little pine nut sweet seed of the pine tree which is evergreen Soul that discovered itself as it discovered the irreparable breaking through ice to touch the rushing stream whose skin breaking allowed darkness to swallow blondhaired Ramona in 1944…
from The Searchers The song on the radio reminded him of Puerto Morelos. It was syrupy and trashy and reminded him of the girl he’d loved there, briefly, at sixteen. Reminded him of ceviche made fresh on the beach and bananas con leche, and of the couple who owned the bar, Tony, the gringo hippie…
A word I can’t remember some black hawk of a word flew out of you at uninsurable speed but with a 4th grade pitch & intonation to it it sounded something like instinctual tho wasn’t— it must have surprised me so as to give me amnesia— and where did that come from I wondered what…
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