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…
I came into this world on the back of a white elephant who carried a talking monkey on the sloped smoothness of her tusk. The monkey would riddle the trees with questions, ask them how many pears they shed in the time it took Monkey to somersault from one end of the cosmos to the…
A wild incipience in the air as if everything stilled is deeply active, the night cascading through the tall pines until it’s in the house. I don’t feel just yet like turning on the lights. There’s an unlikable bird chuckling outside the window. Another bird says to it tsk, tsk. The end of summer is…
Cracked Sunday. Babble of backyard voices, witnessing over barbecue & open flame. Gulls cry above the peeling, fish-slicked decks of trawlers as if they have something to say besides hunger. I tell you these things, O Theophilus— so you will know the apostles when they come swollen-throated on the esplanade’s karaoke stand singing Volare, volare…
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