Good Professor, I’m glad you weren’t my father! The little gods and demons fall in across your desk like infantry — Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan toys, spanning two millennia. Some wear hats with horns, others horned helmets. Athletic satyrs and jackal-headed women stand uniformly muscular. The old in robes, larger, watch us, smiling, satisfied they’ve outlived…
I’d seen it only once, the scar I told my childhood friends my father got at war. A jagged scrawl, like a hurt remark, a lost island on his thigh. He never told me if a woman’s kiss left its imprint there, or if it caused him pain when strangers stopped to stare. But when…
The road is a hard road, and the river is wadded and flattened out Due west of Santa Maria dell'Ortolo. Each morning I drove with its steady breathing right to my right, Dawn like a courtier With his high white hat just coming into the room, Ponte Pietra cut in the morning gauze, …
I killed a fly and laid my weapon next to it as one lays the weapon of a dead hero beside his body — the fly that tries to mount the window to its top; that was born out of a swamp to die in a bold effort beyond itself, and I am he that…
From the very first evening we met, I knew I’d fallen helplessly, unredemptively, in love, becoming, in the next few months, chronically sick with longing, unable to sleep without first constructing elaborate courtship fantasies in which his sculpted, unblemished face appeared at my door, smiling, perfect lips parted. . . . What’s worse, we became…
She’s mending the hem of a favorite dress her bare back pressed against a stove that’s cold for the first time in months — in flannel she felt ugly. But now it’s April the snow broken up by trumpeting jonquils — yellow and green they call her out to the porch buckled by winter’s weight….
with André Frénaud I Pull out the pissed-on clinkers, Rake down the ashes of my bed, and come in And let's do it, as cold as we can get, Calving into the void like glaciers Into the green Northern sea. Give…
I had a father of my own. How was it possible I was a father when I was yet a child of my father? I grew panicky and thought of running away, but I knew that if I did I would be scorned for it by my father, and so I stood still and listened…
1959, 1971, 1953, 1942 Snow seeded the road all night, fallout plowed to one side. On this windless morning, our superintendent is shaving a path to our door, a small portion of safety. . . . It’s 1983. My friends and I sleep and wake childless. From a swing I watched my father work on…
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