Article

It buzzes over my head and enters the wood near the roof. I paint the wooden deck with red and move out of the way, drops of paint like blood after its wings, like a trace of what I knew when it first stung me, years ago, made me dance like the thief of murals,…

We truckers are full of grease. We thrive on grease. That is, while we're young. And we get old awful fast. But most truckers on Highway 81 stop in for Ma Black's biscuits and gravy. She makes her own biscuits and serves them up with lots of her special milk gravy with big chunks of…

I Taking my time, literal as I seemed, crazy enough for silly disputes, actually Asiatically sorry-eyed, reconciled finally to the fact that the January snow behind the silver shed dating back, the sudden sense you've seen it all before appeared to take shape. For the likes of me the weather wasn't any theory, only conflagrations…

The house is a sort of airy structure that moves about on the breath of time. —G. Bachelard The greying bard of Camden sits where two walls meet, afraid of light and sound as it comes in the window: the hearty noise of children playing and women calling out to their mates as they trudge…

Wyoming, 1943 Someone clever has carved a deer out of a scrap of wood and set it on a table or shelf inside a shabby room among a file of barracks, along a street of sleep. In its miniature dawn, its hues are gradually revealed, its legs regain their poise, its eyes open. Someone clever…

On the J train, a gun swung toward the wide-eyed messenger with a crippled hand, the gunman a burly man with sunglasses tells witnesses “Be cool,” the bullet shattering a window after ripping the heart apart. At the Canal Street station, slowly up the steps, head down, he's vanished into Chinatown. Rush hour. Chilled September…

1. After the Reformation had settled the loamy soil and the lettuce-green fields of dollars, the clouds drifted away, light fell on the grass blooming from the sunny snow, and a red barn stood out on a hill with scattered hemlocks and white pine and the shut gate of a picket fence. *     *     * From the…

1 Immigration Master Oki played the word from its scabbard, counted by tens, shouting the colors of decades. Centuries are best worn with their collars showing, he gibed. Grab time by the neck, make it speak truth while the record plays and the money's unspent. He crawled into a season, its leaves were damp and…

How could I foresee what was ahead while looking back seven centuries, one rose in the crystal vase in the room where she stood before me, legs slightly apart, golden dusk all over us when she told me not to go on talking as if I were dreaming, arguing the Summa Theologica's proofs that God…