Article

  • The Land

    Preface & Dedication Late last night, January of 2001, temperatures on this Vermont hill farm dropped below zero. Jeff was in the loft of our cabin, sleeping under two blankets and a down comforter, while downstairs in my pajamas and slippers, with a blanket draped over my head and around my shoulders, I stepped outside…

  • Reflection

    After two and a half years in Hollywood, I came back home to Boston in 1980 feeling like the cartoon man in a barrel. After making the most money I’d made in my life, from writing a TV series I created called James at 15, I was (amazingly) broke. In addition to being out of…

  • In the Idle Style

    It was discovered on an overcast day that the eyes are two holes the sky passes, that white lilies open without assistants first to the roar of stretching space and then the lion’s loin of the sound, the dayflow, and that there is no cure for this except to think of a clear wreath in…

  • Syros, 1989

    No woman knows the power she holds at fifteen until it’s gone. Long, loose S of the lower back. Inchoate cheekbone, bracelet of wrist. Soap-soft, uncertain fingertip. Dumb curve of the bottom lip, stunned to mute by its own prettiness. I wore a shell-pink dress with a boat neck collar, my long hair back and…

  • The Last Morning

    The May morning I came to where     I was not expected. The May morning hazy with the mad     swirl of maple seeds, where you stood blocking the door. “Where is Mom?” My voice lifted     innocent as a child’s balloon. My face needy and vacant, the face     you’d loved, or someone had…

  • The Willies

    I asked Johan why he left home and came to America. How sad it can be in winter listening to the wind . . . No wonder that in the dawn in the mist, one by one figures appear among the trees, making their way to the sea. This is the day when the pack-boat…

  • Frontis Nulla Fides

    Sometimes, now, I think of the back of his head as a physiognomy, blunt, rich with facial hair, the elegant stone-wall shapes of the skull like sensing features, as hard to read as surfaces of the earth. He was mysterious to me in his anterior depths, occiput, lambdoid, but known like a loved home outcrop…