Our accord’s a ruin. One swipe across the cutting board scatters it. Away’s where I’m going and if that’s blood boiling, leave it on. The heart’s a saucepan, not a cauldron, the pint-size heart. It can’t harm you unless you’ve made illicit decisions. Have you made illicit decisions? Grit your wisdom teeth and don’t expect…
They’re free to run anywhere they like whenever they like, so they do. The land falls away from their small house on the hill along a prickly path; there’s a dirt road, a pasture where the steer are kept, swamps, a gully, groves of fruit trees, and then the creek from whose far bank a…
“I had known him as a child when he played guitar: thin, hyperactive; with a clear soprano then. Later, the golden curls had straightened and grown dark. He played nothing now but of a doubt so broad his family feared for him: Talent like that drives the nails in, they said, although it was the…
Curb your excesses, for I change and get absorbed too quickly. See? Already I’m taken in. Be like water, I told myself, strange aspiration for a vegetable, but by nature I was cold and humid. Now I quench thirst. This makes me useful, though primarily for the young in southern regions. Here in the north,…
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…
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