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…
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 1929. The moon falls on the floor, the pantry is empty, beans hardening like rocks in the cans. No, you did not expect this. The same cracked wall with its stains, odor of your mother’s cleaning fluid, curtains with their clean hems, blowing in and out. You touch the bones and lumps of…
For Michael Anania The hundred year old servants Are polishing the family silver. It’s the epoch of the porcelain pisspot, The little boy dressed as a girl. The Master is absent, evidently, And so is the elegant Madame. The Reverend still comes on Tuesdays and politely inquires. His fingers are like teeny cupids. Even the…
(for Jonathan Strong) You set your hero on a sidewalk, curving vaguely, toward the floating slabs of newer buildings — or old ones, mansards; perhaps he’s just found a room there and is very aware of where doors come in the crooking of the stairwell. You let him go in; immediately he’ll start wondering when…
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