The press pass gets you in the door. You have a friend who works for Action News and he owes you for the time he took the MG out to Westchester and hit a ten-point buck deer. You know people who have been hunting for twenty years and have never seen a ten point buck….
In the last photograph taken of my father, his mouth was open to speak, and his eyes, like glass to me, are weak and without focus. Or else the grainy film, malignant cells working, hid him behind a gray gauze screen. It is fall, and the sun, lowered on a string, is small and halting…
Horses wandered on the beach where waves broke over three bodies with a spray of white lace. The left hand of the first dead kept waving like seaweed in the tide. Two moons crossed the empty eyes of the second dead. And the third, whose lover would not know till dawn, did not hear the…
In early June my father drove us west in the Chevy station wagon. I turned eleven in Yellowstone National Park. For my birthday I got an Indian headdress and a tom-tom with a black rubber drumhead. I felt that I was too old for that. By the time we reached Seattle, we had broken down…
That night we walked in the Georgia dark dogs barked and ran in circles. Guided not by the star of Bethlehem but by the beneficent sign of Texaco we traveled toward the only light we saw. Weariness grew in your arms as the child began to cry. You opened your blouse and filled the dark…
Where has this face grown up before? The tintype glassing in the drawer- What, in this afro-ed cousin's-child? This meristem of sallow cheeks, this Thompson twig of fretted lids, this little hollow to the ribcage? If June and Cedar Grove were gone, still this blithe tune all triplets would play on. Cousin and offspring sit…
Joy, who is now twenty-six years old, is waiting to conceive as if by accident a child with the man she loves. This will be irrefutable proof, she reasons, that she loves him and that they must marry. Though she has not believed in God for perhaps thirteen years she reasons too that conceiving a…
The model of the cruiser New Orleans is smaller than life but larger than me. The glass case with table stands six feet seven inches high (I'm 5′ 8″ sober) and about fifteen feet long. How I clean it, once a month, on a small aluminum stepladder, is, first, to brasso the dim brass frame…
You'll always be my friend. Is that clear, Robert Lee? We go beyond the weighing of each other's words, hand on a shoulder, go beyond the color of hair. Playing Down the Man on the Field we embraced each other before I discovered girls. You taught me a heavy love for jazz, how words can…
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