It’s supposed to be spring but the sky might as well be a huge rock floating in the sky. I’m the guy who always forgets to turn his oven off pre-heat but I might as well be the one with the apple in front of his face or the one with Botticelli’s Flora hovering at…
Once mistaken for a man I began to dress like one. Tall, broad-shouldered, hair cropped close, I could wear seersuckers, double-breasted pinstripes, disguised, free to go anywhere I pleased. But I rarely spoke, and was the only woman my rich, old neighbor would eat with. After a day’s shopping for mission oak in SoHo, Brooklyn’s…
for John Casey It is only ever about power, see. Pick the crowd and pick your vantage point, then watch. Learn the con, you have to learn to look for what does not originate in ordinary. Hats will tow you in; and shoes. One good hour on watched shoes you learn the lessons of…
He will tell you how each day wears the impress of childhood fields, where he was made to kneel and harvest darkness, then extract its most pure element, which his father used on his mother with rags, like chloroform. This is the most you will get. He has no notch or opening primed for release,…
After all there is still truth and delicacy. Shall I tell you of the fat man in the darkened theater, or the Russian baritone and his waterbed? No, you want to hear about the scars, layered, scoring my wrists. The man who still sends me his hair, pungent through the skin of…
Everything is so dark under the baby, the table floats legless, a rectangle of light. Around it the angels are bending their doctoral faces, the baby unswaddled, undisturbed. But can you see them? See the kleigs bearing down on the infant, throwing up a stark light on the angels’ faces,…
“That was in another life,” we say. Everyone knows what that means— another love, in another country. “In another life, when I drank chartreuse, densely herbal, fresh green on my tongue, the light filtering through new rainwater fell on a face, beside a café window. . . .” I hear about another’s other life which…
Gored by the climacteric of his want He stalls above me like an elephant. —Robert Lowell Stalls? I’d have wondered, Has he died at last? Like Anthony’s self-pity: I am dying, Egypt, dying. Like Nelson Rockefeller undoing Happy on his hooker. Like a stuck pig who hasn’t seen the dripping knife, Kemal Pasha’s grunting, grunting,…
You know how tiny kids walk up to you, raise their arms and expect to be picked up—I used to do that; that was me. Me, with my diaper full and my nose half-crusty. I remember being eye to eye with the little doors underneath the kitchen sink—I was a child seriously. I used to…
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