We look at a forest and we say: There is timber for ships here, timber for masts, The redness of pine trees Freed from their shaggy load all the way to the top, So they can creak through a storm Like stone-pines standing alone In the treeless infuriate air; Thrust into the dancing deck they…
after Chekhov, via Harold Clurman There once was a man who desired happiness. At odd times of the year he would feel a momentary surge of happiness but he wanted that feeling all the time. He consulted a doctor of happiness who deduced that the man craved love and recommended that he find a woman….
—Hiroshige The mountain is dyeing a long blue cloth that ripples over the rocks, cascading, a bolt of indigo the woodsman follows on his way to gather firewood. The trees reach up on bird toes to the empty sky, their gray breasts furrowed in the plunging light. A few pebbles loosen, the green hills shift…
53 And I dreamed Lao Tzu was saying, There is advantage in using what can be seen, and exists. And advantage also goes with using what cannot ever be seen, and isn't. And of a person's life the same is so. Ah so, I said, so. Some nothing is really something after all, a game…
Because I know a mistake can be fatal, I pick only what identifies without question, puffball, meadow mushroom, hen-of-the-woods. And though there are some delicacies I'll miss, Amanita rubescens, a pale red fruit which may or may not contain the toxin Amanita for which it is named, I prefer to proceed this way, cautiously, holding…
No salt glaze on a dish is so delicately cracked as are this morning's leaves, shelled in ice. The cherry stones still linked to the tree, the cables of the rose arbor, the hips and myrtle husks and curled threads of the Adam's Needle have clung to the clear thought of ice. Scatterings of ice…
is trying to find a way to get out of town. The people are running at him from all directions. The woman who believed in two is dead in the automatic door at the supermarket. The girl who wrote the report on the power of four is naked and tied to the door in the…
When my mother read to us, her voice wasn't like a woman's voice. She sat on the couch and read chapters from long books. It was night, and my father was at work. He took the violin wrapped in chamois in the leather case and played at the hotel in the city. He walked across…
I want to remember the cold mornings I spent that winter in the front seat of my uncle's ancient pickup. It was simple work, the two of us waiting for the first signs of light, listening to the steady lisp of snow over the crowns of loblolly pines. We both knew that near us speckled…
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