I pick him up and take him to the beach. He is always the same and always his sameness changes me. It takes him forever to fold his yellow shirt and blue Bermudas and finally sit. Counting rented umbrellas, he calls out their red and green colors, updating the information every minute. Sun closes in….
It rains in Rodney, in the winter. But we have history; even for Mississippi, we have that. There's a sweet olive tree that grows all the way up to the third story, where Elizabeth's sun porch is. Butterflies swarm in the front yard, in the summers, drunk on the smell of the tree; but in…
Frayed cables bear perilously the antiquated lift, all glass and wrought iron past each apartment floor like those devices for raising and lowering angels of rescue in Medieval plays. Last night the stairwell lamps flickered off and I was borne up the seven floors in darkness, the lift a small lit cage where I thought…
I go only part way back tonight, sidetracked by fly buzz and the lies of old letters, and then Blotchy starts killing flies again and all the years between do their crumbling act, off-stage voices whispering cues I can't quite catch—wind and rivers, dead time plucking corroded wires. The light changes and we're in that…
I went back to Dagger Point Trail after she moved to Baton Rouge. A plaque at the point says the sea takes back five inches a year, but I couldn't tell. The sand and shells seemed the same and live oak still crowned the hills. I remember the redtail tearing the rabbit on the path…
The insistent logic of rain makes you turn from the window and try once again to read the book that made you cry when you were thirteen, the age the Maid of Orléans saw St. Michael ride down from the flaming sky and tell her to mind her mother and always be a good girl….
for Burt Bates was in his office at the state capitol when his ex-wife called to say that Donald Ross was dying. She had heard it from Mickey Healy in Vancouver who had been in touch with Hugh Quinn in Eugene. Cancer of the pancreas, she said. Metastasized. The doctors gave him a month. "God,"…
The track favors mudders, but you pick him anyway; he shares your middle name and the form shows he's run a fast mile and a quarter at Louisiana Downs. I point out it was dry in Shreveport, but somehow I know he'll come in as long as I don't put any money on him. The…
As a baby, my father claimed, I was a cat. I don't know what hard evidence he had, but at one time I played along with him to the extent that, when introduced to strangers, I fell on all fours (I'm not proud of this) and said meow. Later I acquired every known cat toy:…
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