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Though my tenancy there ended long ago —when I moved his mistress's pet dwarf orange trees out into the snow— I still live in the closeness of that first summer the deserted comb flowed in the wall and I dodged old honey dripping on my pillow. It tasted saplike, woody, a thick auburn beer. I…

A beautiful way of looking at something starts at the throat. Always, the tenderest part first like when you try to fathom what the sky's doing precisely and you begin with a cloud. That simple. In it and not of it, exactly. Forming a context like the mathematical perfection of walls in the living room,…

She sits on the mountain that is her home and the landscapes slide away. One goes down and then up to the monastery. One drops away to a winnowing ring and a farmhouse where a girl and her mother are hanging the laundry. There's a tiny port in the distance where the shore marries the…

I felt restored: smokeless stars, clear quiet, a sprinkling of      months. And then—I'd never heard such a sound as my neighbor Shirley loosed, mourning her mother, wailed toward the faith-proof Beyond which kept her dead parent from spring on earth. My friend cried to stars the yelp of an animal. On a tape I made,…

Here comes the black puppy with his ears and his snappy tail and his wet eyes. You say here comes the black puppy wanting to come in or to be run over or for his daily ration of beatings, kicks to the ribs, a smack in the nose and he whines, thank you, thank you….

June, I don't have to use magic burned into roots of      antelope words to tell you what I mean, when I say I met myself in the      Egyptian Room just a few days before my thirty-sixth birthday. It wasn't      vertigo, though vertigo is common in the bowels of the concrete monster.      Crossing Fifth Avenue was…

Blue Sea, black, in the hotel room He paces up and down and at The door the waiter is knocking: A glass of water, there you are, sir.      How my head is pounding      From my head Behind the wall the old thunder groans. He roars so loud that no sound comes. The lily sleeps behind…

He goes to cartoons, then to the western; in a suitcase, bound in leather, are pistols used in a duel; upstairs there is a drawing board, a table, the wine-cellar pop bottle sits on the nation's prose, the summer prose of the field.      With a straw hat, and no brim, he whispers about the east,…

The sabbath morning sunlight was coaxed out with promises of wine gums and toffees. Parishioners sped by in spruced up motors: one look for city slickers and country folks. I was left alone with a precocious youngster, blue-eyed, hair greased and groomed, an obstreperous gleam flashed across his features, as if, it seemed, no invisible…