The day after Thanksgiving my mother was arrested outside the front doors of the J.C. Penney's, Los Angeles, and when I went to get her I considered leaving her at the security desk. I thought I wanted her in jail. I wasn't surprised – I'd known all along she was a thief. Small things: a…
In spring, when the earth turns to food and the mares thicken with what they have kept hidden through winter in their bodies and between her legs weeks early the sac grew of the thin bluish milk that is the first need, in the last days she'd come reluctantly, if then, to the wooden barn,…
Bachelors wives, and maids children, be well taught. — Thomas Heywood One by the papermill, one by pleurosis, this one is learning by harrow and plow. So frail the vessel for lessons of weight, so provident are the ways. Annabel watches the rags in their stew, and see what a mill can make of the…
It's the season before winter. The fish are slippery without their skins. Scaler in hand, toeing the dock's edge, Your back to the lights of Labrador. Summery fish are leaping to rise One above the other. In your dreams you are always Losing your footing, and, Waking to this sign of your sins, Certain only…
Wanting to try her hand at literature, she had taken it into her head to fashion willy-nilly novels, letters, comedies, and other nonsense like that. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, IX In 1955, two hundred years after Madame Louise d'Epinay began planning an autobiographical novel, it was finally published in its original form. Seeing an earlier version,…
All those years he was married, frequenting the map stores. The eight quadrangles surrounding the house in which he lived and worked, he saw them in relief: he pinned them over his desk like messages, justified. He spent long hours studying them. He fell in love with maps. At night he would lie on the…
– from Hamann's Bond The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has become…
He wanted, above all, to crack The New Yorker. He could not deal in the right things, a lorgnette, an Italian garden, a grandmother, Mexico. Mexico is perfect because it is a proximate paradise. Situations come undone without the vexation that Europe can sometimes bring. The New Yorker watches for mise en scene. You feel…
Only a desperado would leave a guitar in the high weeds near the cooling tower. We fear that children, slavering Kool Aid, will stare into that deep, fringed eye, and go alien, hop-ups, strings pulled too tight along their thin necks. Mothers fear the lost guitar, and shiver as they remember the only way to…
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