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…
After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorectics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid and sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has…
“But where will Marcos go?” It's Bruce Lee, last of the Chieu Hois. Taro reading: the Haoles are losing their pois. The barfed-on offer their excusez-mois Hey hey. Thanks for the memo. Un; deux; trois; Banjoist kotoist jingoist Maoist Hoist, the one-man all-girl hula group gets bois trouser and boistrouser half Piaf half ois eau-lyre…
When her granddaughter, who is the pilot, shouts “Clear!” through the cockpit's open window and the prop begins like the earth to make circles we can't see so we must go on faith the sun will rise again, my mother says from the back seat of the C-182, “You'll have to close that window. I'm…
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