Gina had all the symptoms: sleep disturbances, hot flashes, irritability, weight gain, loss of libido, aching joints, and heart palpitations. The one she complained of most was hot flashes, which she dealt with by throwing off her clothes and cursing. As far as Evan was concerned, her irritability was the worst symptom; she was increasingly…
John Clare wrote poems on scraps of paper, erased them with bread he ate afterwards. When he ran out of scraps he wrote in his hat. When he ran out of bread he ate grass.
The silhouette of a mountain. Above it a dark halo of rain. Dusk’s light fading, holding on. He thinks he’s seen some visible trace of some absent thing. Knows he won’t talk about it, can’t. He arrives home to the small winter pleasures of a clothing tree, a hatrack, his heroine in a housedress saying…
She would stand in that place where pilgrims and petitioners who craved God waited for her answers. Intermediary, she would pace as if chained to it: the division in mind. She was no go-between, finally. Look at it, she was Sophia or Ruah, she was hokhmah. Her shopping cart full of bird masks, low-watt light-…
When Bodhidharma came from the West, for nine years he sat, face-to-wall. A student asked old Yang-chi, “What could this possibly mean?” “He was Indian,” Yang-chi replied with a grin, “he spoke no Chinese.” Chuang Tzu says, “If you follow dictates of an accomplished heart, then you have found a teacher. And who can fail…
after John Berger When the beekeeper who lived in a cabin perched on the side of a mountain also a sketcher of rocks boulders and lone trees beaten sideways by wind was visited one night by the shepherd who lived in the valley he served him dinner the way Abraham hurried to greet the…
1 We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases, and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the…
Outside Monterey the highway runs by the sea and the torch singer on the radio has a voice like twilight: “I couldn’t love you more, child, if time was running out . . .” My ten-year-old shaved his head when his mother left, looked oddly more adult last night, coloring the Stay Out sign for…
A turquoise silk scarf, elegantly long, and narrow; so delicately threaded with pale gold and silver butterflies, you might lose yourself in a dream contemplating it, imagining you’re gazing into another dimension or another time in which the heraldic butterflies are living creatures with slow, pulsing wings. Eleven years old, I was searching for a…
No products in the cart.