for John Peck The sun went down for hours on Silver Lake through low clouds and the sun path on the water stretched over the whole end, catching the red and spattering it down into the small waves the breeze made—the wake of motor boats a broad slash of light that spread and spread. Suddenly…
My three-year old holds a forsythia branch down at an artless angle. It yellows out. She names its name for me in a slow, awkward way, and is handed a shiny Jefferson nickel as reward. Now she has a shiny nickel clenched in the same tiny fist. But her brain has already formed its own…
A flotilla of ceilings moves like gulls over the drowned faces of ancestors. In a garden of shells, Kitty, my great-grandmother, plays a coral pianoforte. Her black curls, “beau-catchers”, flutter with every current. The carpets give up their ghosts. All the eccentric corners hold uncles, ginger-haired, twisting pouches of tobacco. The sachet aunts are tucked…
Brawling in the bush with himself our schnapps-bloated German punches free to the sidewalk, mock-orange blossoms in both fists. His bright yellow blazer, a sign of bad conscience — for we know his taste is good, and bottomless — turns every human head. It's twilight, his only happy hour. Truculent finch back from the feeder,…
Name: Esox lucius. Condition: sunlight splits the teeth into multicolored gleamings; a phallic rust obtains for the entire clotted length of tailless body. Comment: its Kafkaesque grin encircles a single stone of quartzlike mauve: a charm.
When my Aunt Lera — tiny now, slow moving and slow talking — wanted to tell me about her life, she began by saying, “Curtis and me had just one . . . year . . . together.” Curdiss (the way she says it) was a genial great man by all remembrances of him, and…
The air conditioner was broken again. Cynthia unscrewed one side from the window and lost interest in fixing it. Now the celery was chopped and the lettuce, cored and cleaned, lay draining in a puddle of water on the sink. Anna hadn't moved her things out yet so Cynthia could still use the good knives….
“Elizabeth passed the chief of the night in her sister's room.” He rode a dark horse through the land of nightmares, his hair pulled back so tight his eye's couldn't close. Elizabeth feared for her sister Jane who was kind to strangers. The land of sisters neighbors the land of English country houses. A letter…
Here, the storm-darkened house: Candles lit against the gloom. We're not afraid of the dark really; Just hitting furniture moving About. The old music stand Rears lyric arms against the sky. (A room needs some height) No one plays any more But we found a lovely folio Psalter — Portobello, I think. Cantate Domino, Canticum…
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