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Every other Sunday we went there. My grandfather opens the trunk and removes a pail crammed full of garden tools, a pair of gardening gloves, in the silence, of course, that a visit with the dead requests of us. He limps to his son's name, kneels down on one knee and grimaces with pain. Inserting…

Until I grew weary of watching the surfacing carp stop just this side of the Milltown bridge to feed on whatever floats, I thought I might die among the immigrant workers, or worse yet, live on forever, nursed like their stagnant steins of beer. The landscape gasped along its barely breathing banks, and I found…

In the years we couldn't live together on land, my family had a houseboat, four families, really, fourteen children among them. I liked to study the adults: one of them, a mortician's son and grandson and great-grandson, who put extra syllables in his words to keep them around longer; one woman, whose legs and hair…

     The man next door broods over fences While the trees in his yard are bent double. He stands like that at the window. Mumbling about wives with dust in their noses Who nudge the soil of their pen for grub. They know the scenery never changes, The sun harsh as a fender. His wife has…

Driving from coast to coast down looped highways, I notice how the future we have been speeding towards for years is receding behind us. We must have crossed some boundary and hardly noticed; people we once hurried to greet are standing along the roadside waving goodbye, your grandfather in his ancestral cap, my mother holding…

for Laszlo There is nothing left on earth that's new so we repeat old stories, journey like a million others, commit the same limp mistakes, take ourselves where we can trace the folly of someone else's life and feel superior, Queen/King-for-a-Day. We are modern—so we know there's no such thing as gods with little g's,…