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To say that she came into me, from another world, is not true. Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it. My mother—I mean my daughter did not enter me. She began to exist inside me—she appeared within me. And my mother did not enter me. When she lay down, to pray, on me,…

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…