Three months after my brother’s death, I saw Uncle Vanya in New York. Near the end of the play, Vanya says he’s forty-seven years old. I’d forgotten that, and the line caught me off-guard. Forty-seven was my brother’s age when he killed himself. I wondered if there was something about being forty-seven—the very beginning of…
Cold drops like a hawk on Blue Hill, Maine. It bores into the skin, the heart, claws the eye. She craves and fears the imprint of weather: piles of leaves waiting for a ceremony of scented smoke, the shrinking day, the sun’s oblique afterthought, cool on rooftops. The stubbled field. A lace of frost. She…
Lo! with a little rod, I did but touch the honey of romance— And must I lose a soul’s inheritance? —Oscar Wilde Yes, until proved otherwise: innocent, innocent . . . Not a lover, more a connoisseur of slender works of art. The form of a cat or cat-o’-nine-tails. Or of a long-necked porcelain vase,…
It started with herrings, which he ate with warm black bread as a child, and ended with two pigs, the forbidden. It started with the strict dietary laws of his father, a pious Jew, a mender, and ended with ulcers, which he disobeyed. He was snubbed by a bouquet of colorful flowers on a balcony…
“Quickly or slowly I will go.” —Jean Genet, 1954 My brother is busy packing for jail. I sit on his bed and watch him set aside a blank notebook, pen, copy of Genet’s Thief’s Journal. Jean Genet did some of his best writing in prison, he tells me. I want to say, He was a…
“Lie down beside me,” I whispered. So we lay on the bed in that room that was the whole world to us. Outside, the innkeeper’s children kicked a soccer ball along the quay. Seagulls flocked and dispersed, and the busy foolish world went about its foolish business. I shut my eyes and we met on…
So far the house still is standing. So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life. An almost readable language. Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country— you know that something important has happened, but not what.
Li Po, this is your invite to the Prop Stop, a honky-tonk unreachable except by boat where we’d tether to a buoy and then, barefoot or in flip-flops, tightrope across a rug of skiffs, two weekenders not looking for trouble but ready to battle any slurs the hicks unleash. I keep samurai toothpicks and wine…
And so he descended into memory, which might as well have been the afterlife, because he hoped that she was there, waiting for him to take her back from wherever the past had abandoned her to, and lo! she was there in all the glow and splendor only memory affords, and such impossible perfection, how…
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