They are not lilacs, though their thousand blue torches rise up everywhere on our boulevard and ignite Spring. I have eyes. I know what I see. A symbol of something like love, conflated with that delicate bruise color. Desert blue, arroyo blue, pool shimmer, blue of the jay’s wing gliding south above the aircraft plants….
It was through our friend Shirley that we met the Kalowski boys. I was eleven that summer, and my sister, Lila, was thirteen. Shirley used to live in the hollow down below us, but had recently moved up the road, where the houses were more populous, closer to the hard road and the still faraway…
Against an empty sky, the elm is feathered with gold like some apparent wing. On the dark avenue, people pass, lifting their collars. Through the lit windows, empty stairwells and still pianos. Sparrows drive their hearts into grass. The moon pulls aside its curtain as if someone is peering there. Solitude could not find a…
Wyatt Ingalls and Esther Markham had separately been hired to bid at auction on Church Owl. They had never met. Their assigned seats were next to each other. The auctioneer, Reginald Avery, had just said, "—splendid Church Owl." From the auctioneer’s right, a tall woman of age twenty-two, with an aurora of dark red hair,…
I have never, but for that first night with Vivienne, vomited in the back of a taxi. Vivienne moved into what had been my brother Ethan’s room in my rent-controlled apartment in New York. I firmly believe rent-control laws prohibit gainfully employed art gallery assistants and copy editors and salesgirls at Banana Republic from living…
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,…
More than peace and cypresses, emboldened hares at the field’s edge, Father, I love gallantry, tenacity, the sanguine heart before the ledge: the artist questing and failing— the feet of bested Icarus plunging into the sea’s crest— the artist triumphing: a page of fire from the book of heroes. More than light-hooved gazelles, views from…
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