One way to look at it is this: the spiritual history of European communism is divided evenly into two parts by the name of Moses Hess. And the essay Uber das Geldwesen (On the Essential Nature of Money) is nothing less than the watershed which divides it. Ernst Bloch has famously distinguished two currents in…
Drinking, looking into the glass, I see a deep well, some clouds moving over it. At the bottom, a small lizard. A gold vapor swimming up. His eyes are blue, sad. He says listen you've had enough of one world, now try two. He melts back into the glass, the clouds break off. I swear,…
Where no question possibly remains—someone crying, someone dead—blame asks: whose fault? It is the counterpart, the day to day, the real-life, of those higher faculties we posit, logic, reason, the inductions and deductions we yearningly trace the lines of with our fingers. It also has to do with nothing but itself, a tendency, a habit,…
Mrs. Lovelady, in a morning-fresh white uniform, helped Lisa's mother-in-law, Mrs. Worthy, into the car. Lisa could only stand by and watch. The bucket seat was too low and dangerously tilted for Mrs. Worthy as she was now, and Lisa wished she had listened to David, and had come in his car instead of her…
This is where they put all the women: the mothers, the injured, the diseased. Someone has moved into the bed next to mine: we share a water pitcher and a bar of soap. Her name is Irena. She is the color of burnt umber, tinged yellow by jaundice and alcohol. She smells of urine and…
Doesn't, when we touch it, that sheen of infinitesimally pebbled steel, doesn't it, perhaps, give just a bit, yes, the subtlest yielding, much less than flesh would, we realize that, but still, as though it were intending in some formal way that at last we were to be in contact with the world of inorganics,…
At the meeting a guy named Ben had talked about a slip he'd had six weeks earlier. Stopped at a package store and for no reason he knew, walked out with a six-pack. Drank it, called the wife who told him to get lost: went ahead and got lost. ended up in the Portsmouth P.D….
The wild snow foretelling winter the snow that whistles down the supernatural into the ordinary world the snow that covers the little matchgirl while she dreams the snow that melts in the gypsies' campfire that melts in their song that snakes over the black branches in the North of France where my aunt calls to…
Every evening dries on a roof of tar, and the screens twang under the weight of bugs in a place not yet given to me. Metaphor doesn't mediate our understanding of the world; we take what comes. Cars in the late night and screams from children are linked to appetite, and make me fear for…
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