We saw it on the side of the road, its back legs splayed like scissors that have come unhinged: a rabbit dragging its ruined parts, insisting on the sweet grass beyond the curb. We knew it was dying, Susan and I. We said We should leave it, as we stopped down the road and asked…
1959 When we set out on the train to Agra I thought, What an old palace we are going to see, it’s an old grave. I was tired when we reached the station and you hired a taxi to take us to the steps of the Taj Mahal; you couldn’t even wait until morning,…
A deer was on Linwood and I asked the forest to come and retrieve her, curl its slow hammers around our houses and decipher brick into scraps of clay. My hardest wishes are for and against ourselves, delicate locusts, ravenous flowers with an appetite for even the breaths between the spaces. Say you are alone….
In the summer of 1967, Nathan Bogmore never woke up before eleven o’clock. He was fourteen years old, and he slept with more intensity than he did anything else. Having just left the warm, rumpled mattress in the empty back room of their cottage, he stood at the front door in his pajamas, squinting into…
Green is the color that defines them, of course. They don’t realize yet, but it’s already there in the picture. Look closely, and Susan’s wearing a grass-green peridot and pearl ring on her engagement finger, for Jim, who’s coming to meet her as the S.S. Carinthia steams into New York Harbor. And Keith has on…
Annual festival of the god of reborn souls and abandon, The young drunken one who dies and in springtime rises: From all over the City families come to the great amphitheater Bringing picnics of roast fowl, rounds of bread, cheeses, Preserved salt meats, clay jars of wine and citron water, Feasting all afternoon on the…
Colors get married and dance steps try but a dance step is selfish. Diagrams make dioxin look like a six-sided dance with carbon prongs but dance steps won’t build up over time. Some of the white leaks out, a strangeness we can’t recognize till marshes resemble these rheumy stanzas but unchosen. Dioxin likes breast…
One of those pizza-like images of the moons of Jupiter before computer enhancement is how I look to this moth, since that’s how everything looks (see Monet, etcetera) before the brain, with help from personal history, cleans it up. And this moth, the poor trustee of one small fraction of a thought, has got no…
Who knows what led me there—a twelve-year-old leading my eight-year-old brother and his overnight guest into the one clean room of that four-story brownstone and plunging into the booze while our parents slept. Maybe it was genetic curiosity, colliding with vodka, a fifth of cheap Russian, and scorching a tunnel to our guts as we…
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