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The Forest

Later the squat white cylinders with their delicate indentations would be revealed as a species of lantern. But when Krzysztof Wojciechowicz first glimpsed them, dotted among the azaleas and rhododendrons and magnolias surrounding Constance Humboldt’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, he saw them as dolls. The indentations cut the frosted tubes like waists, a third of the…

Icarus’s Flight

What else could the boy have done? Wasn’t flight both an escape and a great uplifting? And so he flew. But how could he appreciate his freedom without knowing the exact point   where freedom stopped? So he flew upward and the sun dissolved the wax and he fell. But at last in his anticipated…

Medicine

The Buffalo Vision Late on the third night of the Sun Dance, most of the hundred Crow people within the Big Lodge had fallen asleep. The fire was low, the singers’ voices hoarse over the drumbeat. Only John Sees the Hill still danced in place, his back to the circular wall of upright aspen boughs….

Blemished and Unblemished

Say genius is one side of the mountain, then is vanity the other? Consider Daedalus after he escaped from the king’s prison. The king pursued him. He had many jewels   but Daedalus was brightest. Of course Daedalus concealed himself. The king went to his lesser kings and set them a task. He gave each…

Pismire Rising

Mealy-bugs, shootflies in squadrons, mites. A leech sucks your ankle. A slug slides up your leg; curdled ooze, the glue in the globs of it, leaky muck and swamp water, a lacy scree of green laid upon its surface, glug, glug, mush and slough, bug manure. Each step each leg lugged from its last footprint:…

Cassandra in Connecticut

Some read what’s left in teacups, Or soothsay cranium bumps, or Tarot cards. I read leaf shadows on my neighbor’s house As morning sun brooks down among the poplars Blown by a strong eastern wind. Here’s Count Basie Playing his piano. Here’s a buggy ride. And there’s a wolf devouring a man of God. But…

Last Wisdom

So often in this world what is rejected creeps back to the heart, what is cast off again jams the brain. Remember Daedalus, at the end of his life, gone to Sardinia as builder for the son of Hercules. But faces fretted his memory and he began to make bronze dolls with moveable limbs, forming…

Praia dos Orixas

1. Farther north we came to a place of white sand and coconut palms, a tumbledown government research station, seemingly abandoned, no one in sight but sea turtles lolled in holding tanks along the edge of the beach. The ocean was rough, riptides beyond a shelf of underlying rock, water a deep equatorial green. We…