Two Italians painted on both sides of the grand marble staircase in the Scuola di San Rocco—The Plague. The great equalizer. In this democracy of the dead, a woman and her baby are flung over a pallet on wheels, a man with sinews and massive calves pushes them, and it could be almost tender how…
After graduating from Amherst College in 1963, I lived in Manhattan for the summer and worked at Redbook, of all places. At night, I pounded out Kafkaesque short stories, which I promptly sent to The New Yorker and which were promptly rejected. In the fall, I headed for Cambridge. I had been granted a Woodrow…
When I think about my beginnings as a writer, I think of the floor. I suppose I could think about burning desire, or tenuous talent, but really I have to say that without the particular place where I sat on the floor, I might never have become a writer. Because it was cold in New…
Why let it matter so much?: the morning’s morningness, early dark modulating into light and the tall thin spruces jabbing their black outlines at dawn, light touching the slope’s outcroppings of rock and yellow grass, as I sit curled under blankets in the world after the world Descartes shattered, a monstrous fracture like the creek’s…
Listen to me, said the boys’ grandfather. When I was a boy, you had to be smart or you could get hurt. Their grandfather had already sat down in his old swivel chair. He lit one of his cigars and took a big puff. The boys made themselves comfortable on the floor. We milked by…
What had been hovering in the air all evening, there, as near as the other side of the table— No, not a woman, but so like a woman, turning away and smiling privately. More like a man—a group of men— who have found a way to draw the party to them. Meanwhile I sit combing…
Black drape like a solid shadow, as if the shade won’t slide from her. Veil, abstracted hair lifting on the breeze. Around us heels, furs, and scarves like swatches of Las Vegas, a twitch of liner on a pair of eyes, men in the cut of coats, the usual, long-faced inspection…
One morning beginning to notice which thoughts pull the spirit out of the body, which return it. How quietly the abandoned body keens, like a bonsai maple surrounded by her dropped leaves. Rain or objects call the forgotten back: the droplets’ placid girth and weight; the dresser’s lack of ambition. How strange it is…
The infinitive is a conservation law. Not to mention all the other things Without which we would have been lost, Like the diamond engagement ring Or the parsimony of the rich. A different context is a different play. The girl in the coffee shop Was a woman onstage. Timor mortis conturbat me. Philadelphia left me…
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