They heard their mother yell their father’s name, and came from their beds barefoot and squinting. Jeff Driver was in the kitchen. He was crying, and he told them that the bridge on Cascom Mountain Road had washed out. He looked at Kate’s mother and said her name, “Carey.” Then he looked at Kate and…
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…
I read somewhere that in Kentucky they had to pass a law forbidding a man from marrying his grandmother. It’s the damnedest thing, but I don’t doubt it. I have a cousin there who lives in farm country where the most handsome man is the mortician. Every night Becky prays for a beautiful death so…
Well, another year has passed! And, while it hasn’t been a perfect one, we have survived. Oh, first there was the house burning down—everything ruined: furniture, original artworks, priceless family heirlooms lost because of some sort of electrical short according to the arson squad who, incidentally, interrogated us for 3 months, making damaging allegations to…
“I’ll write a song about nothing at all . . .” —Guillaume IX of Aquataine (1071–1127) When I was young I fell in love with nothing. Nothing had my heart. I was a moody unpleasant youth; even my mother disliked me. What are you brooding about? she’d ask. Nothing I’d answer. For once, she…
The viola sounded like a buzz saw and looked like the sun on methamphetamine. It was necessary, no not necessary, (which was the quid pro quo of mom and pop on Long Island) but amusing, to have something European be dragged through Louisiana in the rain. Our geography was indoors, in the exclamation and point…
January, moth month, crisp frost-flank and fluttering, Verona, Piazza Bra in the cut-light, late afternoon, midwinter, 1959, Roman arena in close-up tonsured and monk robed After the snowfall. Behind my back, down via Mazzini, the bookstore And long wooden table in whose drawer Harold will show me, in a month or so, …
R.I.P., 9/1/20–10/11/97 A sad date, summer’s end. I rarely called but mailed the basket of chocolates you loved, and Mother monitored, Oh, Roy! You were greedy for so little. I’d send the few bad things you cared for: candy, a humidor, bitter, slender, black cigars. Years ago I roused then wouldn’t sleep with a boy…
Clear out here you don’t hear screams, shots, chants of mobs raging, ambulances or fire sirens; maybe some rabbit a fox caught, some young bird squirming in a cat’s jaws or the clenched claws of an owl. Otherwise, the outstretched countryside lies still. Until here in my bedroom’s wall- absorbing darkness,…
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