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The quarry master's house at the far end of town still tilts on the brink of ruin like a clamshell balanced on a rock as goggle-eyed motorcycle gangs gun their engines around the curve. . . . It is ten years since we lived there. We arrive at the dock this time at dusk and…

—we enter and it is our home —Mary Oppen one In a strange city, remote, British, yet barely hanging onto civilization. We are here at the edge. What is asked while closing the door, while turning the corner? Your child is asleep with her last question. By day, I can only manage poor explanations of…

Midsummer's Eve: rain slants into docked barges near the Jardin des Plantes Cut your losses. Soon the inhabitants will leave the city to the international monoglot young. Out of the smallest, oldest perched village branch well-marked paths, beside the stream, the ravine. The streams flow down into the local river. The footpaths widen into roads…

There's a photo of you that we all love. You're wearing your “Surf Russia” shirt, a beer in your left hand. John says it's typical that you have alcohol. You're standing near both the camera and the door as if you had it in mind to leave us all along, waiting for the right time…

I didn't know much about Marilyn Monroe the day she died. I'd heard her name. The world's most beautiful woman has killed herself, said the newscaster. I saw her stretcher on the black-and-white television. I was visiting my cousin's fiancé's house—visiting strangers. But the news about Marilyn had me squeezed on the couch in that…

Thank you for these tiny particles of ocean salt, pearl-necklace viruses, winged protozoans: for the infinite, intricate shapes of sub-microscopic livin things. For algae spores and fungus spores, bonded by vital mutual genetic cooperation, spreading their inseparable lives from Equator to pole. My hand, my arm, make sweeping circles. Dust climbs the ladder of light….

He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. —Julian Barnes Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time and stepping into a Venetian gondola? That singular conveyance, come down unchanged from ballad…

Say I chew desire and water is an explosion of sugar wings in my mouth. Say it tastes of you. Say I could drown because you left for the time it takes a blackbird to understand a pine tree. Say we enter the pine woods at dawn. We never slept and the only opium we…

For Dennis Brutus, who said that during his childhood, his mother recited Longfellow's poems while they did the household chores. A rag rubs on brown soap, swishes yellow lather to nameless plates with chipped rims. She begins by the shining big sea water as I dip dishes in steamy basin. In our tin-roofed township wigwam…