Heat sensors, cameras on automatic pan, vast slabs of prefabricated wall trucked in and joined on site like grandiose dominos. . . . It took the state eight years to plan to keep those men apart from you and me and only sometimes from each other, for even gang rapists and murderers are social animals….
The lengthy lawns of the rich run down to the lake’s lap. Cats steal chiroles from the nets where they’re drying on the shore. Dresses and jeans lie flat below the fish, dancing an ancient, static line. Their owners’ hair floats in black, soapy masses on the green sway. I’m stuck in jangling shade, no…
The old man takes a nap too soon in the morning. His coffee cup grows cold. Outside the snow falls fast. He’ll not go out today. Others must clear the way to the car and the shed. Open upon his lap lie the poems of Mr. Frost. Somehow his eyes get lost in the words…
“. . . for it seemed to me that everybody ought to know about it, but I was afraid to tell, because I knew that nobody would believe me . . .” —from Black Elk Speaks It’s a strange night here in West Virginia, warm for November, one last thunderstorm before winter comes on. Rain…
There were always human handprints on the walls, honey- pawed in the kitchen, blood-red in the bedroom: a house built on snow, beaten and teased and fed fish. The dog dozed by the fire, breathed orange dust from his nostrils and spit out colored dirt. Behind the hearth two children (the kidneys) played with a…
I can hear the rain now, its vanishing averted glance, and long branches descending softly toward cool water. And then a voice coming back from its solitude to find me, “When nothing spoke to me anymore the broken statues spoke to me,” and “Be opened my mouth, untie what is upon my mouth.” I have…
Don’t doubt there’s a future. Rushing toward you. It was flat pavement, a busy pedestrian mall between downtown streets where she was walking in the tattered sunshine of a moist April morning when without warning the sidewalk tilted to her left, and a sharp pain like a wasp’s stinging attacked the calf of her left…
I was having dinner with my friends Howie and Francine. The restaurant was old, maybe five hundred years: whitewashed walls, great black beams on the ceiling, no windows. We felt we were in the midst of history. As Americans, the past seemed absent from our country. The waiter kept knocking his head with his fist,…
Then came the day even as the water glass felt heavy and I knew, as I’d suspected, I grew lighter. I grew lighter, yes. Say, have you ever fainted? Such a distinct horizon as you are raised above your pain, like Chekhov’s, and it was clear to them the end was still far off ….
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