April Owen shows up at my flat around midnight. He doesn’t knock, but I spot him waiting in lurk beyond the screen door. Outside, the rain jumps like pixies on the floodlit blacktop. His hair is soaked and his boots are muddy. “Come on in,” I say, and he does, slowly. His eyes have that…
for R. Voisine His father, two brothers, and me, we turned off our saws for a rest of water and cake. Thirsty, he stopped, walked over and the loader’s back gate yawned and slipped its catch, threw him down onto a fresh stump, still that pink-white wet. I scooped him up. Blood fell on the…
with their children running ahead, the shore is as messy as any other grassy edge where birds nest, rock spotted, blotched by gulls, geese, and gadwalls. Into the flocks, unexpected outburst of a hundred startled teal, wingtips all together, thrumming the air this close! Almost to touch. Wet sand slopped by my daughter’s small hands…
—Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour A chair, A nuthatch on the trunk of a walnut tree, The bloated belly of a dead deer, A man of seventy Grunting at toenails he struggles to pare. A woman In a straw hat over straw-textured hair Kneeling in a garden. What is not now departure will be. Foam on…
For one thing I’m glad the goal of enlightenment means being so utterly stupid as to actually slip out the door every morning & live. With no second-guessings, no poses, just this leaning & slouching the experts term hope. Because people like me aren’t guilty of laughing at the passing streets. I mean I believe…
Already pregnant, she writes her name and his, Lou and Mike, over the cloudy pictures in True Stories. Black-and-white pictures of a leggy woman (Lou) draped, the arching stem of her throat almost tears from her head, so thrown back with pounds of hair and a dark man’s (Mike’s) kisses. Done eating, Mike scrubs the…
A sow rooting around in a garden uncovered a silk purse. “Oh Good Heavens!” she squealed in horror. “That’s Gertrude’s ear!” Another sow trotted over, and stared at the soiled object. “No, no,” she concluded, with a relieved snuffle. “That can’t be Gertie’s ear. Gertie’s ear didn’t have a clasp.” …
—Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society The man with the crooked dick strikes a match. The woman with one arm breaks into flame. The man finds a bird’s skull and wants to play catch. The woman hears the skull calling her name. He looks out the window. She looks in the door. He crushes…
We even breathed shyly, all the while envying everybody their courage & finesse. But either our nerve gave out, or we were much too patient, always over-rehearsed, like those old men, the frowners who spend hours fly casting in the park, practicing, each flick of their wrists erasing the memory of streams and flame-spotted trout….
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