The long-tailed mouse that gnawed a hemisphere into my box of ginger snaps, the dust-gray mouse whose dung speckled the kitchen floor and countertop, the mold-puff mouse whose claws roamed through paper garbage bags, creaking crumpled cellophane, the pointy-nosed mouse with nostrils trembling, the defenseless-eyed mouse, cute and sad-eyed, shocked by sudden light, the chomping,…
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…
When my brother tells me he’s been seeing a psychiatrist, I say, "That’s great, Jack." He says, "Why—you think I’m fucked up?" I say, "How’d you find him?" He says, "What makes you think my psychiatrist is a man?" Her name is Mary Pat Delmar, and Jack tells me she is brilliant. He says, "She…
Avila, 1982 When the civil guards approached me and asked me for my papers, I recalled the face of a sunny saint being disemboweled on the rack. Widows in perennial black, addicts of prayer, find comfort here the way monks in hair shirts must take to penance, or me, addled in my blissed-out days in…
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