Jana and I were in the bathtub on a drizzly afternoon, miles from anywhere. She was turning the hot water on and off again with her foot. I leaned against her, comparing legs. It made me think I was seven again, at the Albany Art Museum, copping a feel of those rich velvet cordons when…
The suitcase, deathly still by the door, sun-warm, waiting in the dusk-darkened corner. The cars coming and going there. Summer an endless usher of drugged voices, thunder, cold nights in the fan's path, water thin over the face, the dresser's black square. Then, quick as odor— rain on a jacket, steps in the foyer. In…
I climb the stairs to your loft. You open to me with a cold desirous stare which frightens me. You show me your toys musical instruments, clappers, mallets, drums electronic equipment. Rehearsal city, you say. You show me your room, your bed. Everything is brown. You give me tea. You play the music you have…
You can take it back now, not as in beginning in medias res, but as in your desire for a plot— because if what you want to know is that on January 17 of some new year Toyotas went on sale in Sacramento, where there was a subplot involving the San Francisco dealer, and I…
When the woman watches her husband sink into that dark, lakelike nothingness of disease driving him to forget everything but the faucet's cool stream, where again he wrings his hands, her slender arms assume this rounded shape, curved in the malleable shadow of themselves, waiting. Or tucked in stoic repose the pelicans finally at day's…
Down the dusty road, and down the river, down below the Bull Cafe. The sun is up and Luster rises. A long hair divides the dog's water dish into the yin-yang. Luster leans to her toothbrush. The roots of her hair throb in her scalp, her heavy hair. She is naked, and sweating already. Uncle…
My friend wears boots to sleep so that I might learn her path. I know the way now. The room is as silent as a child in a closet. I hang this notion from an instrument of hindsight where it rocks at the appropriate moment like fortune's cube on a string. My neighbor with no…
We have traveled a long way riding the chilly island ferry. If a piano were playing it would not be the music of Handel. The gull floating behind the ship is a perfect syllable dying to be born, a piece of ash freed from the ship's stack. We raise our arms with saltines until he…
1. VIRGINIA BEACH Late air sweet and jagged with mosquitoes, ocean extending its deep hands along the shoreline. Bride's lace of surf, lace of mourning crossing its long wrists— Perhaps death is fine, as life is fine, and comes in beautifully from the horizon. This is where Edgar Cayce came to peel the world back—…
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