I think of ecstasy as water. The full moon: habitual and dull. I prefer the mountain to the valley: above the timberline, silence precedes the child, and the accidental scrub seizes one with beauty. I spend evenings in my wingchair imagining the moment before my birth, the rush of air before I descend to need….
She let her heart lead her and it led to an interior where young trees bent and glittered as aspens should. She quaked and could not eat before him until they became accustomed to darkening noon. After awhile her heart said, No not this, and she moved across the river. By now the sun was…
Before supper, my father's wife shouts my brother out. He has come too close, touched her like a son, she said, like a son. I don't want any more sons. And my father, ignoring this too, glad he is on the Florida coast now, goes out into late fall's twilight to pick his grapefruit, ripe…
I was seven. I took the train to Ossining. Blue lights, a symphony domestica, families fastened in across the river from the prison. The air smelled of laundry. At the hospital: coughing, a swinging lightbulb, a few inarticulate phrases. In another century I might have prayed. Did I understand, he asked, what it meant to…
For the rain around Mount Snowden I bought an orange poncho, nylon, paying a pale-eyed Scotsman four pounds in a new glass, aluminum and pine mountain shop outside Capel Curig. From the Isle of Skye, he said. And I further, I replied, to bring juice to his eyes, the old bastard. That's true, he said,…
A mile into the sky our plane is practically nothing. This turbulence of air—also nothing, like the loose cells that float within the eye. Connecticut rolls and pitches below— Einstein was right, mistrusting his own feet, and so was Bishop Berkeley, for a plane glinting unseen among leaden clouds, droning toward the Atlantic unheard, is…
There is no excitement in the dove's call. We think we know what he means, and that he would say it whether or not we heard. We think there is a garden lined with poplars and wrought-iron benches, painted white, where obedient children sit studying shadows among the pebbles along the walks. In this garden…
“While I go through the procedures expected of me (pouring milk on cornflakes, complaining about homework, playing a game of catch with my father) I observe, I collect evidence until I become certain: They are all actors — mother, students at school, father, salesmen in stores, bus drivers; crowds walking on the Green or sunbathing…
Where better to worship music than church — sanctuary amid sanctuary? Above us, some incense of desire swirls mindful and apart. Call it a lost bat, circling this quartet as counterpoint, as jazz dissolving their surging measure. At first no one sees the looping presence in the dusky rafters where, other nights, all eyes might…
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