In this field of day lilies just opening, beating for sun in this lush summer bear meadow, I tried to find a way to stay in your world, wife. The field hummed with life, the bugs and frogs and jeering birds but no words came as I had hoped from the sky blue as a…
It was Labor Day, September 2, a Monday, five years ago, and I was twenty-seven years old and about to bring my forty-four-year-old mother and my forty-four-year-old father together for the first time in my adult life. All my life I had daydreamed about this moment, wondered if it would ever happen, and now that…
In the first week of the last month of the semester, a new young inmate came into the classroom, took a seat, and watched the teacher with sharp eyes. Soon he was involved with discussions-even wrote essays, original stuff, quick-zipped them off, so smart. Sharp, and charming, good-looking yet warm, yet an edge of violence….
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…
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