When we were children, my brother, Frank, and I handled our mother’s danger signals differently. Mama could pluck a word from a simple statement, then snap it back covered with ice. Her very blue eyes could deepen from midday sky-blue to late-afternoon darkening blue, or worse, to night-charged-with-lightning blue. Her normal alto-toned voice could rise…
Existence can only be justified from an aesthetic perspective. —Nietzsche When we come upon the hawk for the first time, I am reminded of the line by Cézanne, the landscape thinks itself in me then imagine a current of sunlight for the bird, the aerial pencil sketch of nearby meadows and woods, the light hysterical….
Their nature? Sanguine, warm and humid as blood, and they comfort the heart. Please help yourself. The names I can’t pronounce—something like paradixani, gerosolimitani. Here, have a taste. I used to be less liberal. I’d cling, think flesh of my flesh. But where does that lead? Collapsed brown mouths the deer won’t eat come winter….
If the novel is the bastard child of two passionately but uneasily matched parents — poetry and journalism — then the short story seems clearly able to trace its descent from the distaff side. I grant poetry the female gender, for reasons that there should be no need to state. Or if there is a…
Part Two Section One 1. Not far from here, at the end of River Run, is a group of streets named by the Mave brothers for the members of their family: John, the father; Marguerite; and her brothers, Charles and James. At the end of the main road was the house where John Joseph…
L. infantia, inability to speak I hear your infant voice again, unspooling on a tape made years ago— No, though it was paradise, I can’t, can’t go back to that room, filled with your rounded vowels, the sighs and crooning of a newborn child, bright syllables strung, like beads on a string, into meaningless meaning….
I had only one prayer, but it spread like lilies, a single flower duplicating itself over and over until it was rampant, uncountable. At ten I lay dreaming in its crushed green blades. How did I come by it, strange notion that the hard stems of rage could be broken, that the lilies were made…
She’s just dying to see you, so excited, and you really can’t refuse a ninety-two-year-old,” said Miles Henry to his old friend Grace Lafferty, the famous actress, who was just passing through town, a very quick visit. Miles and Grace were getting on, too, but they were nowhere near the awesome age of ninety-two, the…
I was born on the grounds of the Mount Mohonk Hospital for the Insane, where my father was Chief of Psychiatry, and because of this I grew accustomed to the sounds of misery before I went to sleep at night. I would lie in bed upstairs in my family’s house, which was situated one hundred…
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