SUNDAY The sky was overcast and the weather cold outside. Sylvia called her mother early in the morning before Mass. The mother talked to an older son, David, and later left with the youngest. The two of them took the bus to Pasadena, catching the 92 on Florence and Holmes Aves. in front of the…
Since I don't know who will be reading this or even if it will be read, I must invent someone on the other end of eternity, a distant cousin laboring under the same faint stars I labored under all those unnumbered years ago. I make you like me in everything I can — a man…
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…
She is sickened at all she knows: -about the many ways to make gray with watercolors, creeping up on it from yellow and blue and red with a lot of water or down from black or purple. And brown, brown can edge into gray too somehow. -about corruption in the unions, every union she can…
A farmer digging a well in central China uncovered the site where 6000 terra-cotta soldiers were buried by the first Chin emperor. . . . [guided tour] How we would love to take the things of this world with us to the next: a wife, a well-thumbed book, something in gold, perhaps, to mimic sunlight….
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…
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…
1. Blue, Arrival She arrives but isn't met because he lost the time of her arrival. The blue air of late autumn carries her to the gate, where she turns over her first-class ticket stub to the mute at the ticket window. When he looks up he sees the cobalt stone balancing her middle finger,…
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