According to the stories my mother tells, I refused to speak a word until I was almost four. She became so worried that she took me to a doctor — an extreme act in the rural Kentucky region where I was raised; in fact, for the remainder of my Kentucky youth, I would never see…
Never discount what began his wanderings. In Athens he was the greatest craftsman. So much work he had to hire his nephew to help him. But his nephew had his gift and soon people claimed the nephew’s gift was greater than the uncle’s. If the uncle built with bronze, the nephew built with gold….
for my great-grandfather We ran from a home we never saw again. Saw nothing remain ours. My arm shot from my body. My wife’s broken neck. Our son burned into a wing of smoke. A peeled face boiling with flies. A man tearing his gangrened leg off with his…
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…
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…
Morning met the grass in whiteness white sparks, chalk and bone. Noon was a gristle of crickets. Dusk was black leaf smoke, quick, then dark, star-still, darker still.
These are the reminiscent lettuces, And girls with pockets full of teeth Will disappear in them, in fields of watered lettuce. They sing when no one watches them in lettuce. “Love what no one else would love. No one Else would do it.” They dot the far rows of lettuce, Scavengers, enamored of the lettuces:…
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,…
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