All the way home, I kept thinking of the lost finger of St. Teresa, displayed in the gift shop of a convent where she spent most of her life being thrown by the devil down the stairs or gripping the handrail after communion, so others wouldn’t see how it took all of her strength to…
Slate gray lake. Willows in a rough wind. On the far island, where the shoreline is tattered with fallen trees, it is not yet spring. The waves won’t allow it. Won’t allow anyone to land there, let alone to leave. Not today; maybe not for a long time to come. The bramble takes…
This was more like it, looking up to find a burlapped fawn halfway across the iced-over canal, an Irish navvy who’d stood there for an age with his long-tailed shovel or broad griffawn, whichever foot he dug with showing the bandage that saved some wear and tear, though not so much that there …
Johnson, Vermont Yet another metamorphic swimming hole, waterfall where language fails. Gneiss, schist, slate. You can hear nouns meta- morphose to verbs, gnarl, shiver, split, then strip down, tumble in granitic kettle-holes and camouflage themselves in green water, green because pines hang above the fault-line and shade language from blue-blank sky where some- body’s watching,…
I didn’t exactly grow up on them-not like the way my teenage years were permeated with the music of Josh White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. The Rolling Stones grew on me later, late in the sixties when I was in my early twenties and my subconscious was searching for some kind of…
Twenty years ago when I guest-edited a fiction issue of Ploughshares, I wrote in my introduction about a scoreboard I had been keeping for the previous seventeen years: a sheet of paper I kept tacked to the wall beside my desk upon which I listed various items out in the world (stories, novels, scripts, essays)-where…
Eyes the color of winter water, eyes the winter of water where I Quoits in the Spartan month Hyacinthius, the game joins us, pronounces us god and boy: I toss him the discus thinking This is mine and the wind says Not yet Memory with small hairs pasted to pale wet skin (the flower hyacinthos,…
Whoever said that I should count on mind? Think it through, think it up—now that I know so much, what’s left to think is the unthinkable. And the will has grown too tired to stamp its foot. It sings a vapid song, it dithers and mopes, it takes its basket to the marketplace, like a…
I think at last I will give up the Blacksmith House. I’ve liked the place since college, when my best friend, Celia, and I would meet for coffee in those frugal, scrubbed pine rooms, full of the feel of long-dead Puritans, which we were not. You could smoke in public in those days, and we…
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