In a brief introduction to the last issue of Ploughshares I guest-edited (Spring 1985, Vol. 11, No. 1), I noted that nearly twelve years had passed since the first issue I edited (Summer 1973, Vol. 1, No. 4) and that I’d be happy to do it again in another dozen years or so. Blink: a…
You came down to me in the hollow after work. I was reaping my just desert of overcommitting myself this March to too many taps. I was resting for a while on a stump, listening to the steady drip of sap in the pails. You were dressed in a skirt and purple blouse,…
1. Today I walk, find countless calla lilies. How anything grows its own perfect white and stays that way—unafraid of world. It is lovely, so I look. It doesn’t matter what it thinks of me. 2. This is what I’ve been given to look at. I never chose to be here— California gardens, riches. There…
Beatrice needed a new liver. Her old one had succumbed to damage suffered in a fall one month earlier from the top of a seven-story parking garage. She lay in a coma while the hospital prepared for her imminent transplant, but she was not asleep. That part of her which was not her broken body…
When it becomes possible to sleep with his brother’s wife, George Norgaard jumps at the chance. He has in fact been wanting to sleep with her for years: he’s spied on her at picnics, at Christmas, and once years ago they kissed too long-but nothing like this. Now they meet in hotels, in bars, at…
He showed me brochures for the last moment of my life. He had done an elaborate makeup job on his wrists, so it would look as if he had tried to commit suicide. He gave me a ring, bright as the eyes of a child on a stupid church trip. Our families threw advice at…
Listen, Leo, remember the lifeboat we pilfered from what you said was an abandoned garage sale, 1442 Columbus, not the explorer, the street? Last night I came to, retired to the basement to ponder my position on circumspection, the fate of the cruel & unusual, & drink until I passed out. I had my underwear…
i. Other People I begin with what I see plainly, before and around me. There is much to curtail. To one side, my neighbors are a family, extremely nuclear in a contemporary way. There’s a mother, a father, a girl, and a boy, both children from previous marriages, the girl blond, the boy brunette, both…
In Chekhov, everyone’s unhappy— this one loves that one who loves someone else. The doctor, a fixture of the plays, is always old as Chekhov, who died young, must have felt himself to be. And the aging writer, who also resembles Chekhov, chases a girl he will abandon soon and is stuck with the habit…
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