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…
If rational thoughts could erase the irrational the rain coming down could lift itself up and begin again its purpose on the road, the miles of dust to invade. I'd remember my childhood stories where refusal was merely a namesake gone awry, a river miles too long. The old ghost could sing again his simple…
After days of drifting, the man arrives at a confluence of doors. Had he been adrift on a river, instead of the ocean, it would seem as if he has encountered a logjam from some long removed past when the virgin forests were being dismantled. Had he been drift on city streets, he might have…
You know the way you hear a voice sometimes, muffled, as from another room, and what you hear is intonation, and you can tell, almost right away, if someone is arguing with someone, or just talking, or making love, or if a child is there, or children. Intonation: the rise and fall of sound and…
The sun widening its skirt, catching the trail the ducks leave as they glide across the water . . . if you belived. . . widening until it's made a window in the wall of cloud, an opening between this world and that other made wholly of light, which we must take on faith. On…
Poa compressa, Canadian bluegrass, grows well in both damp and dry climates, blooms the entire season, won't brown even with a late frost, and is a real royal blue; in the right sunlight it looks painted. The first crop on my brother Nelson's grave has come in thickly, almost plush, and kneeling on it, sliding…
This issue of Ploughshares engages in an old ritual, an occasion that can be confusing to anyone not close to literary careers: literary discovery. What? An issue about discoveries? Columbus? An issue of stories and poems in which someone has to discover something? One of those party-game types of thing? Well, no. This is an…
Fifteen feet from shore a seal's pug head, then slick cigar body jerks up, vanishes under the surface as your voice rises this is why we're here isn't it? Something I forget often and with great accuracy. Until the world jars me— this seal, or, night after the lunar eclipse, when we sailed under a…
Jamey promised to lend me a copy of Nausea. He had borrowed the book from Mr. Loden, the only English teacher at our school who wasn't a nun. Mr. Loden was a Quaker, and he liked to loan us books that weren't in the school library. He owned seven copies of Catcher in the Rye….
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