In Spain I never rode the Talgo. The Talgo was the express train from Barcelona to Paris, but I never went to Barcelona. This was years before the Olympics, and Franco was finally dead. The white gorilla was still around and all the Gaudi, but I never made it there. Partly it was the expense….
Donald Hall recommends Eastern Mountain Time, poems by Joyce Peseroff: “These poems are local and universal, intimate accounts of landscape and people—with an almost pervasive shadow of elegy. In ‘The Ridge’ she makes a tableau of the dead, from a friend to a father. Always loss is mixed with joy, especially in the natural world—no…
Or a gauze that only measures a wound. Or a path of frozen ruts, mocking escape. What remains is a distraction, the ratio of exhibitionism to buoyancy. Which loses its shape first? Lung smoke? Stocking?
When do you begin traveling? When your airplane lifts off the ground? When you leave your house for the road? When you pack? When the plan first comes to mind? When you admit to how restless and ill at ease, even murderous, you feel at home? When you take your first steps? When you…
These strollers here under the arcades, these anonymous passersby, how would you greet them if met at parties except in banter? “Are you vegetarian? Virgo? Rhesus? An alto? Mesomorphic? Melancholic? Here’s someone sanguine. Phlegmatic? Rheumatic? Optimist? You must be my- opic. Blotto? Sit down. A zero? Now, now.” But no, they walk past each other,…
I was hoping for some contact with the natives, the ones who built these sepulchral impediments, an iron pianist whose music issues from a hole in the head, a broken column, a big marble ball. This is how they honor their dead even when the ground’s too frozen to make a dent, the fauna dependent…
Or: The Story Behind the Failure of the 2003 Radio Salsa 98.1 Semi-Annual Cuban and/or Puerto Rican Heritage Festival The church is quiet except for the nun’s approaching footsteps. You could imagine the sound of the soft soles of her shoes scuffing down the center aisle, coming towards the last pew, barely growing louder as…
after J. Henri Fabre O scribe, miner, pedestrian tracing the page, try eating your house from the inside: fruit-house, dung-house, make it your task to bring forth flowers out of filth as you cage the syllable, force the cadence; grind and pace or mimic your betters under the argot surge— Observe this recluse scarab waxing…
Make room, said he to the haystack. The point is great; take that; your groom arrives. Lie back; spread grass; never a borrower be. Rakes groom, he said, fakes doom—though choosers don’t mind beggars. Said the haystack: It’s a wedding night, so I’ll keep one eye half shut. (Clothes do make the man, said the…
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