My mother had been a debutante. She had renounced her frivolous nature when she met my father, who was a scholar, and had once demonstrated to her the purity of his soul by pronouncing boogie woogie with soft g's. They rushed to get married before the war because they assumed he would be sent abroad….
In the first dream she is the enemy — spangled in love’s armor, wearing the sweater she knitted for him, and she looks prettier than in the photo you discover in his bottom drawer that puts her in perspective — all scowls and squinting at the sun, unflattering as he has captured her. Possession is…
The train is crossing a river in a city where everything’s a shade of brown, though it’s June, but when I look out a pleasure boat tilts by, making a wake that resembles a triangular scarf: flat and silver, following the boat like a thing. Looking: it’s optional and safe the sense with a lid…
Put no trust in nothing, not even yourself Yesterday was like summer, today snow blows I’ve walked six miles with an axe and wedge Actually make my living near a river that runs bright water Home to a small hawk found mangled in the woodshed Eyes opening, I load my rifle but won’t use it…
"Hurry up! Can't you drive any faster?" "I do and we'll land in a ditch!" A madeup moon, my mother's frantic face, bobbed over the gray upholstery horizon of the Studebaker seat. "You, Bette! Move your head! Your neck's not stiff, is it? Is it?" "Now take it easy, honey," my father's voice soothed. "Take…
negotiate their way across a frozen lake, careful not to touch, careful not to upset each other’s balance. The house is quiet; I have been thinking about them all evening and now, my window spills across the ice the narrow path of light they are walking on. It’s hard to see but I think the…
Beneath the fabric of leaves, sycamore, beech, black oak, in the slow residual movement of the pool; in the current braiding over the wedged branch, and pouring from the ledge, urgent, lyric, the source marshalls every motion to the geometric plunder of rock — arranging a socket of water, a cold estate…
Last night I was seduced. "Lord," you must think, "this I've heard before." But then I could be wrong. I constantly overestimate my powers of intuition. Some days I walk to my store, my small shoebox of a bookshop, and feel the women near the bus stop stare at my balding head, my cracked shoes…
My envy of people my age or older whose parents both are living frequently, alas, takes the form of contempt. First, the parents are old. Old and bald and fat and slow or old and ill or at the very least mothers like what their daughters fear themselves to become, fathers blinking owlish at the…
No products in the cart.