In the almost empty cafe I light a cigarette, taking pleasure in blue hieroglyphics the smoke makes. This is the first free time I've had to myself in months. In Egypt the beautiful, leathery flesh of a mummy aches for the sun's nonpartisan appraisal. New arrival, at the next table, an old man—in a voice…
24 may dear brenda, i have three mfa letters to write; lately i have been obliging all my students to write on the same schedule, which means i have one week of very hard work, followed by, or interspersed with, three weeks of anxious leisure, in which i wonder what i ought to do with…
. . . the bird on a branch painted by some Sung academician is a symbol to express what we might call the bird-on-bough aspect of eternity. The Arts of China, Sullivan On a branch somewhere in eternity a bird sits, each feather one silhouette of the brush laid flat on the page, each leaf…
I'm your private dancer, a dancer for money. . . — from a Tina Turner song When Celina arrived the floor was on fire. You could tell by her hips and her mouth she was built for the tango. Glasses of clear amber danced the tables on the tango rhythm. You could tell this place…
Orioles bubble in the shade of green sophora, secluded courtyard empty this spring day noon; painted curtain hangs, golden phoenixes dance, solitary, but the embroidered screen, one stick of incense. Clouds in the azure sky have no fixed home; in vain my dreaming soul comes and goes;…
So far no one's confirmed the words that say we're made of earth. Yet there they are in writing. A title on the blackboard — the teacher vanished without warning, his lecture gone undelivered. Tell me, you digger of deep wells, …
If I follow in her tracks she stirs up trouble, and if I rest from the search she rises up in anger. And if on the road for a moment, out of loyalty, I fall on her tracks like dust, like the wind she flees. And if I seek half a kiss, a hundred taunts,…
Her soul has returned to the deep void, her spirit returned to mist: She stayed among mortal men for only eighteen years. Yesterday, I gave away her skirts and sashes to monks, My heart broke: they still were tied to the strings of her lute.
What if time came to a stop? Surely the end would be struck dumb. Up on the hill the house where you were born is waiting for you to build it again. How and with what — bricks, wasn't it? The chimney's all you can remember: smoke vanishing in spirals like the string of a…
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