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My grandmother is tired. She sits at the foot of my bed and asks where I go. I show her my books, and she smiles at the text for Chinese 101. As I turn the pages, she reads the characters she knows—moon, noodles, peace, fear—and asks about those she does not. “We haven’t learned that…

“I’ve decided the only thing that really interests me is how the sun hits a white wall.” —Edward Hopper to Andrew Wyeth   Somehow the crow snuck in, its caws echo             in the fluorescence of the hallways. We are all waiting at the ICU ward             for your suffering to come to an end….

Haydn conducting the first performance of the Farewell Symphony for Count Esterhazy in his palace, the work composed so that here and there an instrument would cease, each bewigged and bespectacled musician pack up his case and depart, the rich sounds in that great hall, with its plaster curlicues and cherubs and six-foot candelabra, diminishing…

It is thicker than a woman’s hair. A boat tipped on its side spills a gift into the waters. The lake holds a hundred and two wonders in its still embrace. A cold wind wrinkles its surface like a spent sheet. You cannot write on it the way you do on a wasp’s hive. A…

Photo of Beckett on the fridge. He and I, smoke. All three of us are humming. A gust twitches the plastic wedge covering the kitchen window. I see a neighbor at tai chi, posing like Giacometti’s tree. Latched to his hand, Sam’s cigarette is a sixth digit. From down the block we hear a child’s…

Miguel told me he had been home alone for two hours, studying. It was in Guanajuato when he was twelve years old, on the Day of the Dead, and his mother and sisters had gone to tidy his father and grandparents’ graves. He didn’t remember why he looked from his book on the dining room…

the o’s of his shirt the o’s of his spectacles, his eyes, and his pupils the o’s of his navel and nipples the o of his belly of his face and nostrils his crown of empty hair of the caps of his knees, the balls of his heels o of his watch face and the…

Nothing whole is so bold, we sense. Nothing not cracked is so exact and of a piece. He’s the distempered emperor of parts, the king of patch, the master of pastiche, who so hashes other birds’ laments, so minces their capriccios that the dazzle of dispatch displaces the originals. As though brio really does beat…

for James Carroll       The freeway shudders under heavy trailers, and layers of accumulating afternoon heat.     A cormorant perches atop an inlet piling, the creosote log, driven into the silt, swaying     in a trace of tide. Desolate gravel raked around the storage farms, the winter-fuel stockpile.     Then, monumentally squat, the natural…