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One by one I throw your empty bottles into the black garbage bag: J&B, Barbella, Cutty Sark, Harvey's, Wild Turkey, Smirnoff. I'd almost forgotten that ritual, when I used to come down here to check up on your stash. And when I did, when I lifted the lid, I wanted to lie down inside and…

“How come your typewriter is saying thank you thank you thank you?” What children hear! Everything speaks the language they're trying to learn. My typewriter which understands nothing says what I am trying to understand by saying it, always grateful for the chance connection: light through sudden darkness, the rung missing, the moment of weightlessness,…

Someone like The Past walks in, sits down beside me. The moon blazes slowly, a burning ship in its last hour. I try to talk to the woman inside me who will not let me sleep. There is a glass in my hand. My reflection in the windowpane is small. My face is the face…

Before the intervention the exhalation had begun. The spirit hid within the ear, and what he felt, therefore, became what he thought he heard. The place they had placed him in pressed in upon the drum. It sounded like a sandy bank, a gravelly run of waterway, reeds whispering at the bend. When the mill…

Friday. Home from school; and the smell of ammonia's so strong it opens the back door for me. The hall floor flicks a long tongue. My socks stick to its shine. Faucet fixtures gleam like new fillings. My fingers breathe on them, leave silver eclipses, and on the stair my footprints leave their imprints on…

A man at the bus stop stooped to retrieve a dime rolling towards the drain. Looking at me, he said with shame, “No ordinary dime, mister.” “Really?” I said, thinking how life is sometimes reduced to a single word, a reflex, a courtesy. Like the time I interviewed this young man for a job in…

Just as the car hits the fire hydrant the water, smearing its bright load, blinding the oncoming drivers who crouch in fear behind their wheels, a young boy is working the lock of the glass door of KAPLAN'S JEWELRY STORE with a penknife. A Spanish woman, hiking up the sleeves of her T-shirt, is speaking…

The pimply-faced teenager sniffling, slamming the door, who will never kiss a woman's breast till his first gray hair is in. The grown woman nibbling shaved radishes and washing them down with a thimbleful of vinegar. All this and more, against a painted backdrop of skyscrapers, in a time of general abundance and exile. In…

Horowitz debuted a Schumann piece in 1928. This new recording is acoustically precise, with a persistent cough from the audience, loud, in two parts, both exhaled sounds (a sharp, then a flat), the second higher and more forceful. It sounds like a man's cough, a mature man in his forties or fifties. You can tell…