Today I returned To see those two worn-out and rumpled Representatives of the common world (Were they mother and son, Or did they merely resemble each other?) Kneeling in adoration Before the elongated Mannerist Apparition of the Virgin Bearing a chubby five-year-old Son of God Out of her sacred house And into the world As…
. . .by the barbarous king So rudely forced —Eliot, “The Waste Land” Aunt Phil was no fin de siècle brooched-up elegant with one eye always on the karat though she was almost married to several goose- bottomed men. I begin where the last had the balls to jilt her. She'd even put down a…
Just yesterday afternoon I heard a man Say he lived in a house with no windows The door of which was locked on the outside. This was at a party in New York, New York. A deep Oriental type, I said to myself, One of them indescribable Tebootans who Habitate on Quaker Heights and drink…
You know what it's like Sundays to wash, brush your teeth, pull on pants and sneakers then amble to the grocery a few blocks away for juice, milk, bagels, then carry them back, make coffee, toast—you know it. But the box of rats sitting on the counter as I left seemed all wrong, cruel, what's…
When Letitia stretches out on the couch after a hard day and tries, in vain, to teach her cat to walk back and forth across her belly, she decides enough is enough. I can't do everything myself. She imagines inventing a machine of hands which stands by the door like a hat rack waiting for…
It turns out that I was supposed to eat the blue Hubbard squash I got for Christmas, lung-shaped refugee from the winter closing of the farm market, relic of a profligate ambition. My friend tied a red ribbon around its stem, and I thought it was dying, so I mourned it. I found a place…
but about death and women I've never known enough to really say, to help myself, to resolve, define, understand, to hear the voices crying, muttering, cursing in their endless soliloquy the subjectless theme of women, death, the source of all anxiety, the root I need to see, inspect, touch, Henderson lay his hand on the…
Seventy degrees on the winter solstice, a yule moon sifting through ragged clouds into the undersides of trees —lamplit, pearly gray—like the bellies of huge snails whose branchy horns test whatever it is the winter birds sail in on—or, not birds, but the wings we were meant to put on later that same night—I knew…
He kept the maps. They'd had a cardboard Kahlua box of maps, forest service maps, topo maps, road maps, some of them from the early Sixties when his parents had taken him and his brothers on road trips in the summers. She had to admit they were mostly his maps, though she'd grown to love…
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