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High Lonesome tipped back his hat and his horses snorted. Maybelle nodded, her teacher’s smile a wild azalea in miles of cactus. My uncle’s buckboard groaned to a stop, in town for flour and grease and beans. All that, decades ago, before he taught me how to cowboy. Five summers we broke broncs, patched fences…

Everything rots but flowers leave memories. I was the boy who loved flowers, dried, fresh, not just their fragrance but their bee-stung bodies prayerfully folded into dusty skin. I was the boy who walked limp-limbed, scent-drunk, with the smell of spit on my hands, swearing: Relinquish me of my desire to be sunlit, beautiful. They…

You came upon me like a shadow and you came into me like a shadow and there you dwelled within me and I in you; we were cast on the black water— we were cast by the will of the wind— and thrown upon the darker shore where no things grow and the dry leaves…

“Name the eight states that begin with the letter M,” Mohammed, my driving teacher, says. I’m forty-one. Am I in school? I glance at the rearview mirror, glad I can’t see my embarrassing STUDENT DRIVER bumper sticker. I spread a ghost-map across the windshield, quickly scroll down the East Coast, top to bottom. “Maine. Massachusetts….

We raked until raking puffed our mitts with hot blisters. Then we desisted. Wind de-raked our raking then, spilled the tops of our piles, blew new-fallen bronzes across brief spans of lawn. We worked like the damned: I the Sisyphus of fall, you the Sisyphus of autumn. Rakes dropped, we drifted through discarded wrappers to…

I think I will become a selfish man. That’s what it will take to purge myself of my sick need to give. Strong is stubborn, many-limbed, but single-minded. Alone. I think I will be just like Eric was in boarding school. Early in the morning, when insomniacs sit awake, I would watch him running hard…

I stood before the lintel; the door swung open then. Your name was there, and mine, and the date of every birth— all was clear as day, but they could not bring me in. Beyond another door and then another, endless more, yet the distance had been measured in the dust— one print stepping after…

Christmas defeated Chanukah once again last night by a margin of three billion dollars or so, but every time I hear a Yiddish word like bupkes in a movie (L.A. Confidential) or when Oleg Cassini in that new play Jackie calls a garment a shmatta, it’s “good for the Jews,” as our parents used to…