It was only the marvelous gravity of your attention, That weighed me down, that made me seem self-delighted, Sunk like the moon in a mandarin’s cup of reflections, But truly I was suggestible as the morning. When you laced wings on your shoulders, birds rippled over My smile; when you hunted and crimsoned Into a…
The calm, early-summer afternoon that “in the flash of a moment would be shattered by gunfire”-the newspaper writer expressed it this way-had been unremarkable for the Blakelys: like the other “returning commuters” (the newspaper writer again), they were sitting in traffic, in the heat, with jazz playing on the radio, saying little to each other,…
S andalwood, Jaime whispers to himself, recalling the vendor who had sold Tony and him the three little vials of this scented oil and the five foil packets of incense. He had a makeshift stall outside the bus terminal in Dudley Square. Wearing an embroidered red and black tarboosh and an immaculately white T-shirt, on…
In memoriam: Irving Howe Hearing the news, we headed for this garden, a children’s picture book, a black-and-white movie turned to color for the Oz scenes. We’d planned to take him here. In this arbor, crabapple trees enclose us like a vault, their branches splayed like nerve ends over us. It is before…
Where did I get the idea for this picture? It was the year of El Niño-the current, I mean, and not anything else that I knew about at the time-and the meteorologists were telling us to expect strange events in the atmosphere. They didn’t say anything about events at home, where it hadn’t been good…
Neighbors, please don’t mind me this morning at windows balling my fists at the sun. Lowdown bastards, imbeciles & infidels, a tribunal of jackasses behind mirrored sunglasses with satchels of loot—wait, calm down, count to twenty & take a few deep breaths. You don’t…
When I was white I came and went, a cycle of blood and moon and tide, hid nothing of gun-shape inside me, debated evil with no one. I said: Bring me something handsome to eat and they did, that steak butter, you could spread it on bread. I said: Bring me taxis. They…
The man at her door was bald and wore a blue windbreaker. She had asked him twice what he wanted, but he had only said, “Are you Emily Fletcher?” as if he knew she was, but needed confirmation. It struck her from the man’s salutary tone that she might have won something-an envelope was about…
“Dear Muzz,” I wrote, the summer I was ten from a seedy nature camp in the Poconos with cows and calves, huge geese, some half-wild ponies —heaven for the urban savage I was then— “I have to do this letter to get breakfast. Kiss Kerry for me. I milked a cow named Clover.” (Kerry, my…
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