The widow refuses sleep, for sleep pretends that it can bring him back. In this way, the will is set against the appetite. Even the empty hand moves to the mouth. Apart from you, I turn a corner in the city and find, for a moment, the old climate, the little blue flower everywhere.
From Anecdotes from an alley "There's a fire at Voorthuyzen's bakery on Main Street," his father had said during breakfast. "A large blazing fire," he had added. Half an hour later he shuffled back, his head lowered. His father had laughed at him. His mother had found it childish that he responded so angrily to…
”I’ll meet you under the clock.” When, set loose like children Kept in through the long winter, Spring finally came, And the old hotel seemed theirs, all New York, Each moment announcing its presents, Fresh, self-invigorating pleasures To be sought out again and again, As if eyes and brains and nerves Can only absorb so…
It is a foreign symmetry, unlike anything in the earth’s surface rubble — the headstones, grouped by family to organize the sacred rows; the flowers at the fresh site are forced blooms with exposed glands of pollen and the widest throats; even the neat packages of food, each container marked with the names of the…
I have no photographs of my father. One hot Saturday in June, my camera slung over my shoulder, I take the subway from Greenwich Village to Chinatown. I switch to the M local which becomes an elevated train after it crosses the Williamsburg Bridge. I am going to Ridgewood, Queens, where I spent my childhood….
The day’s too beautiful; The Spring sun on the porch too warm . . . He’s restless; nothing can contain him — Not his books, or a whole house full of toys, Not even the hidden fortress he’s built Deep in his grandmother’s garden — For this is his special day. His secret love is…
“Like a boy,” she said, and opened her robe to show him the plate of bone and its center flower of black thread. Only flesh, he thought, the breast cut loose from its net of skin. And if she could not dote on him, he’d answer her bell in the bedroom where she is…
Mother said, "You know? – your father was an only child." The insight was not so much given as discarded. She brushed the sleeve of her housecoat across her brow. "You see," she gasped – and I saw quite vividly, although I was eight years old and still partially invisible; my invisibility enhanced Mother's soliloquies….
“But it’s only a cigarette lighter . . .” — Offering From the guarded hand of a twelve year old Whose father is unable to start the briquets. Oppressive July, the first of two weeks at the lake. Whosh! The flames leap up as the family scatters. “If you have a cigarette lighter I’ve got…
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