My friends, we'll each receive a special steel prosthesis, and walk upright! We'll erase this stupefying cuticle, and feel! Our fluids will move through us like a kiss, like a soft light inside our nakedness, where nothing was but excrement and terror, made worse by the nice doctors—Was that us, that bad child making faces…
Kneeling in the dark street I gathered the dog's body against my chest and his cobalt eye rolled forward, sightless as a doll's. Afterwards in the changed rooms his shadow curled his taste and smell on every chair. In the desert, a starving coyote rips a chicken from my neighbor's coop. My neighbor honors him…
Coastal rain, an iron sky. Granite mainland, granite island. It's too cold, I'm too cold, to row across to the mainland. The pickup needs an inspection; I ought to row over across and drive her to Gray for a sticker. Let it wait. There's still time. There's time this morning to read the whole day,…
for Judy Couffer, 1955-1986 All afternoon I try not to watch the shuttle explode. On silent televisions throughout the hospital it lifts, a compact shining house astride a column of flame, curves, and blows apart, each piece leaving its trail of smoke as it dives for the sea. Again and again, the camera slides over…
“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet's uncle midway through the murder of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering courtesans. Here, as in Denmark, it's dark at four, and even the moon shines with half a heart. The ornaments go down into the box: the silver spaniel, My Darling on its collar, from mother's childhood in Illinois;…
Cecily's parents are divorcing, and perhaps for revenge, perhaps to distract, perhaps to build self-esteem, her mother Kate has taken to frenetic self-improvement. Shopping trips, perms and cuts, nail wraps, aerobic exercises, massages. Now she is going to Calistoga to the mud baths. Cecily finds the idea of mud baths bizarre, yet, curious and amused…
Years ago on a Sunday afternoon in late October Hetty and her mother's boyfriend Dyan Trumball-the one who played acoustical guitar with a local band-were walking in the lakeside park a few miles from Hetty's mother's house. Hetty was thirteen years old at the time with a narrow face and dark warm watchful eyes-so nervously…
Something that sounded like the town plow just went by: there must be snow. What was it I fell asleep thinking while the shutters strained on their hooks in the wind, and the window frames creaked as they do when it's terribly cold, and getting colder fast? I pulled the covers over my head. The…
Sweet Jesus, talking his melancholy madness, stood up in the boat and the sea lay down, silky and sorry. So everybody was saved that night. But you know how it is when something different crosses the threshold—the uncles mutter together, the women walk away, the young…
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