The owls are impossible, priceless, a hundred points at least. They live at night and call from the dark like children. Their heart-shaped faces, their moth-like silences—. But the carrion crows are obvious. They enter the pines with parts of their wings still caught in sunlight. Four, then five of them bitching, ragging the emptiness….
The dreadlocks had all fallen off from chemotherapy, and so when Marley died in Switzerland they flew the body in the hold to Kingston, where he would lie in state, or in the anti-state he’d written all those hymns for, his face ironed into repose and sweet, or bland if sweet couldn’t be done. “Baldheads”…
Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to take it off. They…
Great God of any particular mood. Sometimes it is all too bovinely obvious. Driving home from the Indian college I followed a car jammed full of buffalo heads snaking along the road to White Clay. Belching smoke on a blistering day the rusted heap of a car cruised, exuding the miasma of red men with…
Pomp churned through midtown like a combine, razing a path to the Waldorf-Astoria. At 34th and 10th a black man drizzled a wan froth of soap and dirt on my windshield and paused for me to pay to get it squeegeed off. He just wanted, he said, to make an honest living. I gave a…
When Russell Banks and I agreed that our theme was to be Borderlands, we chose it partly for its open-endedness. Literally and figuratively, borderlands strike us as places where powerful forces come into contact with one another, where sparks fly. Specifically, it’s the politics of that point of collision that we’re interested in. Whatever else…
The Low Road Soon she headed into the wind. Sepulveda Boulevard would lead her to the cornfields and crows of Scripture, a field gullied by rainfall, and parking lots where men sat in cars smoking. Sometimes they got out of their cars and went to the bathroom in a cement barrack. This action scared her…
Some years ago in your infinite European boredom you finally concluded that maybe Indians are really a noble race, yes, somewhat tragic but definitely tied to the earth. So, you decided to become one. Why not? Who would care? And who would know the difference? Your cheekbones were a little high and you were a…
Here’s a romantic prison for you. This could be Scotland: a crag and far below the froth-marled river. Where is the stag, the laird, where are the baying hounds? Welcome instead to Hotel California. Johnny Cash sang right there, in Graystone Chapel, and from the blue, disconsolate congregation he drew, like blood, whoops and yelps…
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