1. Georgetown, Great Exuma. Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in the Chat and Chill Bar on Stocking Island. KB, the Bahamian who owns the place, is looking for an argument and can’t find one. Mandela versus Boutelayzee, University of Chicago versus Harvard, chanterelles versus portabellas. Even Mushroom John, who brought his wife, Sandy, down…
From here it looks like forgiveness, the possibility of a man: himself a meadow I traverse by sight, by feel, hand over hand across the green of him, eyelight by eyelight until I take him all in. Or is it just the front yard again, azaleas, hot pepper plants, and a stand of pampas grass…
1. Tonight the clouds resemble French surrealists soft and electric and hot to the touch hustling north from the New York Public Library as if to grab the lease of the vacant apartment on E. 49th Street Frank O’Hara rented for $31 a month in 1952. Poor clouds. They have no sense of time and…
For what did one raise these children? For what did one labor and heave and suffer reconstructive surgery; for what did one feed and clothe and coax and school, raising them from sitting to standing to making their own money, if not for their well-deserved gratitude? It was work, it was a lot…
It started with my mother using the walker to get from her bedside to the bathroom and me saying wow, and wonderful. It started one morning when my mother looked in the mirror and asked: Who the fuck is that? Disgusted. It started with the medicines: the ones that make her cheeks…
You drove all night through thunderstorms, the PA turnpike slick and narrow in the passes. The tractor-trailers roaring, and sleep whistling past your ears . . . My heart was where a hundred roads converged & then moved on At one point you drove under a mountain. Later the sun unfolded over the…
The man I learn from drives us from carnival to carnival in a Chrysler hearse with a convertible top. In Futura Bold, it says Theobold’s Body Shop. He is a man in his mid-forties—trousers, all of expensive cotton; shirts of silk. He has a different pair of soft-leather boots for every day of the month….
Halfway through the song I catch her, Irma Thomas and her band slowing down the heart in a 6/8 swing. How many quarters did I once pour like honey down the jukebox’s throat to make her sing again? That was Markey’s Bar. I found some peace there but can’t drink it back. This is California…
Replace “snow” with “sparks” and see if the moral survives. Lie down and make a spark angel. Then replace “angel” with “angle” and see if morality survives. Our liberal society depends upon the difference of each flake and the capacity of the different flakes to form a drift. I looked down into my bowl of…
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