This morning, I turned down Mozart to listen to a mockingbird perched on a wire outside my window. Poor Mozart. Dead, he was much the worse for comparison. But as soon as I lowered the music, the mockingbird flew. He had been listening to Mozart.
Two weeks after her husband’s death, just before I left for the airport, my mother said, But how will I get to the lawyer’s on time tomorrow? I said Well you’ll leave the house in plenty of time, she said No no, how will I wake up in time? You’ll set the alarm, Mom, and…
They lived in Tennessee for five months. George had wanted to move there to play guitar, an idea he seized on late one night, in the hopeful, dreamy fog of too much youth and too many beers. When promise is like a drug, the stars are supernatural, water is glass. There, in the bedroom, he…
Just because you think a man is dead doesn’t mean you should leave him. Really, the dead have a lot of advantages over the living. Think about your dad. How much better you get along with him now that he’s passed. It’s time’s way. And why in the end everything turns out okay. A lot…
artist unknown, Venice It’s an enormous canvas. Beyond rows of oars men stab and thrust, grab each other’s throats, pitch bodies into the water where they sink or else are driven under by keels and pikes. It feels odd standing in this great hall where another tourist is being warned, No photograph. The flash gives…
Call it the distance at which certain universals quiver into focus. Call it a kind of motif in the face, a relief in recognition, a cathartic thrill from the comfort of a couch. It’s why a Russian can write of slow death, and an American can feel his scrotum tighten as he reads the tale—even…
One morning they dig up the sidewalk and leave No sign of the truck only the large dark shadow digging and digging piling up sludge with a hand shovel beside the only tree Two o’clock I come by and he’s slumbering in the grass beside rat holes Three and he’s stretched across a jagged stone…
I thank God for el Mercado, in Santurce, where we filled our bags. I thank God for the chopped translucence of onions above which we poured oregano & salt. & I thank God for yellow oil in the pot, the buckle & hiss of heat under a pan. I am thankful for the kitchen table:…
circa 1946 Just after his release Mas took a psychological test. Three questions he never forgot: Do you think people are out to get you? Do you feel you are being followed? When you see a crowd of strangers walking toward you, do you try to avoid them? To all three he answered yes. And…
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