Just after I had landed my first job— they needed busboys at the Mexican chain restaurant that opened where Lake crossed Route 17, an intersection known in town for being dangerous—we met. Among my new responsibilities was polishing the silverware, he said while pointing a dull butter knife at me. He plunged it in a…
The leaves made us think Of a letter trembling in someone’s hand. In fact, many letters in many hands, And then they no longer did. There was a bedraggled old woman Walking With two gray boards on her back Joined into a cross To cook her dinner with, And then, We were somewhere else.
Words sat up and behaved when James Merrill was around. Whether poetry or prose, Merrill’s writing always sounded like it fell from a tree, perfect from the start. His memoir, A Different Person, was no exception. In it, Merrill explored his early life as a young poet, a dutiful son, and a gay man in…
A wolf whose eyes glow red and jaws close quick meets the voluptuous Miz Nude Bo-Peep beside a shepherd with a crooked stick: and, ever after, they enthrall lost sheep. The wolf prowls round the shed. Straw, timber, brick— he’ll blow through walls, smash every windowpane. But wait—he’ll cut the sheep a deal. It’s trick…
Is infinite, said my wife, Quoting Solomon, Which made me see stars, The vastness of the universe. The one who is not a fool, Like a sugar cube that fell in the sea. The one who is not a fool Like a tarantula On a slice of wedding cake— So I covered my ears.
The good news is that Tim O’Brien is writing fiction again. In 1994, after his sixth book, In the Lake of the Woods, was released, he distressed his many fans by vowing to stop writing fiction “for the foreseeable future.” Then, a few months later, he published a now famous essay in The New York…
1. Eisenach, birthplace (in 1685) of J. S. Bach. Close-by, on a high hill, Schloss Wartburg, the Thuringian landgraves’ ancestral stronghold. Which also sheltered music, judging from Elisabeth’s aria in Act II of Tannhäuser, a paean addressed to the castle’s Great Hall as she waits for the Minnesänger to file in and join her. Music…
In those days, this was how you got to my place: Down from Ruidoso and Ski Apache, you took U.S. 70 (yes, the very route Billy the Kid, notorious bandito and youngster, hightailed horse-style to freedom in olden times) through Tularosa, past Ray’s Tire and Lube and the C & C Restaurant and Lounge, into…
The cicadas again like kindling that won’t take. The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember the terms of— the rules. What was it was going to be abolished, what restored? Behind them the foghorn in the harbor, the hoarse announcements of unhurried arrivals, the spidery virgin-shrieks of gulls, a sideways sound, a…
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