I can remember one particular time, in her grandparents’ attic: her legs, slightly older than mine, shaved amphibian smooth, her breath around my face like an evaporated puddle, naked or almost, in semidarkness, her blue eyes dusk. We wouldn’t allow our mouths to touch. She’d hold her hand over mine and tongue her own knuckles….
We fixed binoculars on it. John the Bird Whisperer’s two zero-in guesses— the black kite’s helicopter spin, or swoop of eagle, a wedgetail obsessed with high mysteries. Who brought the strongest lens, the steadiest hold, that cloudless morning in Canberra? Still autumn at that point, going into winter. post-fire and pre-fire. A…
gone to ash. Someone told us the pond no longer went silver in wind. Someone told us Eucalyptus melliodora is melleus (honey) and odora (sweet smelling) though nowhere in the house even under such trees did it not reek of the grate. John the Bird Whisperer: that golf course saved this whole…
I kneel by the redwood cutting basal roots, taunt slivers that shoot up from the base, and think how this tree is always reproducing. And if I’d birthed that child, the last, or the one before, they’d be grown now, cast off from the shore of my mothering. There’s an odd comfort in knowing my…
I. As a child, my mother boosted me into a dumpster of damp discarded library books. I fished out limericks, and Langston Hughes, and stack after stack of Hardy Boys. Years later, when I came out to my mother, behind a closed door, I cried like a wolf. I didn’t know it then, but…
and then he turned it upside down in the garage where he considered its half-painted, dull fuchsia, cast-iron belly and drain hole fixed with what looked like a sawed-off copper snorkel, and how it rested on its gunwales that now were gutters. Something to behold so he beheld it. Its eponymous feet he arranged…
I once believed we all have one chance to love deeply, an opportunity not only in the business of flesh and heart but in the loneliness of the soul, and if we miss it, as I thought I had on June 15, 1976, waking up in my room that fronted Half-Moon Lane, Herne Hill, London,…
Looking for the strange places, we become envious of whatever crawls from under rocks and out of seashells. We invented this new ocean, this nameless waterway to another sundial strewn city. We look for all the minuscule theaters enacting moss-covered recitations and pastoral renditions. This must be what we wanted, what we planned for and…
Translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat Life is too short. We’re always running late. Not enough days in our lives to learn anything. You wake up, you hug your girlfriend, you have breakfast, you work, you eat, you sleep, you watch a movie and you don’t even have time to read Seneca and convince…
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