There were only a few perfect spots in the world, and Leo Spivak had finally found one of them, right here in Mendocino. He was stretched out just inside the screen door of the brown-shingled beachfront cottage he and his wife, Rachel, had rented for a week-just the two of them, alone in all this…
I keep remembering how he said You couldn’t bite into one without staining the meat. Egret ice lily egg bone-china white, only wounded, streaked by the skin’s rich red. Heraclitus, Heisenberg, a boy up a tree on a farm. And how they proved uncommercial. No good for butter, no good for pies. You had to…
No one is awake yet, neither the cardinals who live in the gnarled, rotted-out apple tree, nor Lucy my younger daughter whose shrieks are our alarm and birdsong. This is the best hour, neither night nor morning, a place in which shadows become more real than the things that cast them. …
I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument could end up with his father grabbing a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurling it out a second-story window. That, I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift…
For five seconds or so, backwards seems possible, the heirloom un-be-smithereenable. When the voice first said gently, “We lost her,” Wally roared, “Then go find her!” Freeze frame: this is Simon and me at the pier, alive in some previous hour. Happy, we were happy beyond disbelief.
Wherever we travel it seems to take the same few hours to get there. The plane rises over clouds into an unmarked sky, comes down through clouds to what we have to believe is a different place. But here are the same green road signs the numbered highways of home, with cars going back and…
Look at me. I’m standing on a deck in the middle of Oregon. There are friends inside the house. It’s not my house, you don’t know them. They’re drinking and singing and playing guitars. You love this song, remember, “Ophelia,” Boards on the windows, mail by the door. I’m whispering so they won’t think I’m…
One of the old ones has fallen in. The pond has autumn’s clarity and layering, leaves afloat and sunken, sky reflections over the bottom’s pebbles and scree. I make up names for the colors of this leaf— allol, draeth, breen— while an ant walks all the way up its stem.
Paestum, 1997 On an afternoon like this I want permission to forget the many varieties of cruelty. I want the only figures of the past to be ancestors of these wild poppies, of this chestnut tree whose blossoms break through the hardest wood. I know that cruelty flourishes just down the road, persistent as these…
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