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Shorebirds occupy a patch of sand near the ocean. Eighteen or twenty godwits work, driving their long frail beaks into sand recently made slate-colored by the falling tide. A dozen turn their backs to the surf and walk inland, striding on legs purposeful and thin. Their abrupt walk integrates motions that seem contrary to us,…
They were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That's what she'd thought: Why, he's falling to pieces. The place was called Gary's. "Honey," he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face,…
1. Heroic Measures My friend deals with each new wrinkle in his illness as if it weren't one more step toward the inevitable catastrophe. Always a loner (he claims), he's now tasting the sweetness of friendship for the first time. His thirty-year writing block dissolved: grim, heartbreaking poems—pulled, he says, from the “iron jaws” of…
We never had a cabin in the woods. We never had a yard, a dog, a child. We never lived in the same neighborhood. We never ate, half-naked, on a tiled terrace over the vineyards in Languedoc, or drank milkshakes on the toweled front seat of that fifth-hand Chevy pickup truck whose gears required a…
These fish are older than I. Every morning I learn from the koi how to swim in the wind- ruffled pond: the flow of the tail, the fan of the fins in water, eyes open all ways to the shadow-life moving beyond us. Who knows what goes on under the bridge, the plank where I…
in memory of Alfred Satterthwaite 1. Leave the doors open, the poet says, the whole house open all night, so we may die a little here, in us, and there in him we live a little. Before anyone died here this house stood open. I could see from the darkness Isabel and her sister shelling…
When New Yorkers said "train" it meant the subway. As in Count Basie's "Take the ‘A’ Train," you took the "train" to go downtown to Greenwich Village, or uptown to Columbia on Morningside Heights. I took the IRT line to the local stop at 116th and Broadway and got off there to go to college….
Since she's not in a hurry-not ever, anymore-Lydia Zimmer takes time to read the signs. Loose Carrots, Cherry Tomatoes, Pickling Cukes. She nods, stopping her cart by a bin. Purple Top Turnips, Lemon Curd, And she squints, her eyes in the mornings clear but dry. California Seedless. Another cart pushes around her, a young mother…
It takes a needle to complete the job— pick the two choked eyes empty of the thread, pick out the particles of sweater wool. It takes a dark, thin book to tray the pickings (they're hard to gather off her skirt, the floor) and chute them in the trash can; takes her tea-tin container for…
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