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Master Oki, Keeper of Days

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…

Brooding

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…

Home

When you're in the mountains you feel the desert air. Waking to fog on a salt marsh you taste the empty boulevards of July. The earth shifts with you, one road hooks to another— a travesty of coins, shards of amphora, a trail of carnelian, things to palm at a riverbend. Words in the hand…

The Sanity of Tomatoes

1. Tomatoes are not a poignant fruit, not with their wide, affable faces, their compliances with the eager knife. They recline in slices on the cutting board, all their operations a success. Their miniatures pose shinily in salad bowls, beaded with moisture, bathing in exotic dressings. When you bite them whole, they squeal in delight….

Metamorphosis

When you were a child, on hot, drowsy. tropical afternoons, in a secret hideout at school you peeled and sucked mamones, gnawing the sweet, fleshy pulp, remembering stories of how addicts of the fruit had been asphyxiated by mamón pits blocking their windpipes. So each mamón was an invitation to ecstasy and death (mazard berries…

The Prime of Life

“The Prime of Life” is one section of Scattering Carl, a book set at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts from late spring to mid- summer, 1978. The book has the form of a journal—prose notes and meditations, poems and poem fragments. It is a fictional journal, a made-up journal, a falsification and strenuous…

from The Generations

Edge out on the thin quaking limb of Arizona, our lost farm, the desert stretched rimless from eye to end. A few stone buildings, weathered woodshed at the axle, then long spokes of wire sheep pens ray out along the dirt tracks that know Mesa and Tucson but stop at the world. The sheep huddle…

from A Different Person

I Decision to go abroad. My dearest friend and my latest love. A Proustian party. A night in Vermont. Meaning to stay as long as possible, I sailed for Europe. It was March 1950. New York and most of the people I knew had begun to close in. Or to put it differently, I felt…

Crows

Childhood Garden of Eden: the backyard with the view of the textile factory— three poplars braiding roots, a few dusty lilacs. After school I liked to stand between the trees as in a great branched basket. A neighbor knocked a crow's nest out of the tallest poplar. The birds circled and screamed for hours, two…