Was I the last one waiting? Epochs passed, tides tossed the island twice each day, sometimes a lazy shushing, sometimes violent—then tides would frighten me, countdown clocks striking off the muzzy days and nights. Mosses grew around me—pin cushion, pale shield, old man’s beard. One gray day, walking on the sand, I found a wooden…
a man sitting across from me in a French restaurant in New York City a name is a word is the first form of domestication an explanation of the secret language he spoke with his father in the marketplace in la Villette: lincsé for five francs, larante for forty and the word for money, le…
The sea is clean, unscuffed: it looks convincing, the sun like hearsay slipping into it. Donde están sus padres? a small girl asks me, pink plastic shovel in her fist, the paint of her dress still wet in places. I have no answer, I’m glitter, I’m hardly here. She’s glad and kneels as…
They moved into Silver Glade with a brand new baby, unnamed, although the grandparents had it registered for high school as Clementine Wrentham Farmer. Wrentham was their name and Farmer was the name their daughter, Lina, used when writing the check for the house. Her professional name, to their joy, was still Lina Rose Wrentham….
Paper boat on a dark stream— Put a candle inside the boat and let that stand for woman, and let the water stand for man. Downstream the willow lets down her green tresses. The water sings as it moves, inexorable, past the banks sodden and rank with mud. The candle makes a chapel of light….
Every time I looked out the window, there was a different kind of light. I remember other things, of course but it is the only thing I felt in that blinding way. In the pain, I said, What is the happiness? I’ve never been so pure, I said . . . felt it to open…
All my life before him, every word I wrote had heard the notes turning into air above the pages and spinning my desire into jail and joy, or memory of someone not quite gone. Like children in the womb or eggs asleep in a girl’s all possible, the words I gave to paper heard whatever…
for Stanley Plumly Today, putting on my socks, I noticed, on my right foot, an ugly bunion and sore hammertoes. Overnight, it seemed, my alphabet of 26 bones, 100 ligaments, and 33 muscles had realigned themselves into the jumbled sentence of my mother’s right foot. How did my mother’s foot suddenly become part of me?…
Lemon light, curd of worry. My eye is all iris. Look through this small viewer to penetrate the black shaft. Who’s this? Who’s that? Green goes to yellow over there. The eye wants to be investigated privately. I’ve lost my sense of humor, vitreous jelly, a small island floating under a dark mood; the eye…
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