Article

Seeing Daughter Off

“Blind are still the eluded eyes.” That’s Swinburne, who would not interest, hardly an author for this trip taken away from me, this time by your own choice, not your mother’s. I smile, you flash inflamed brown eyes, letting me see that no good will and certainly no money paid to the lady clerk who…

The Dignity of Life

Two people stood quarreling in the Casket Showing Room. They were a sixty-three-year-old man named Marlyn Huutula and his unmarried sister Estona. She was so angry that she bent towards him from her end of the coffin. "You really ought to keep your grimy hands out of that clean quilting!" Estona told him in a…

The Nelsons In SR

Those bungalows of San Roque so perfect yet oddly sad (“a little wood & stucco to keep the sun out”) always remind me of where the Nelson family lived way back in the days of Hi Oz Hi Pop Hi Rick Hi David. Everybody in that family was Okay every day for a whole decade….

Posthumes

Darius Milhaud, last of les six, advised      me (his final day in Paris, from his highly polished            black and chrome wheelchair, gaunt, arthritic, a worn angel under his      uninsured Légers the Germans had left behind) the most                        delicious roasted chicken that he ever ate was cooked up by      Brancusi, in the…

No One We Know

Grates, blinds, weeds in all the ground floor windows. Sirens, whooping wounded birds, lead love harmlessly away from the scene of his soul’s animal injury: The look on his face: Mother, I have wet my pants with blood. We pleaded blood, blood get back in that body. But the blood looked happy to be out…

Elegy For John

We lay him down in silence as if we were the first people and we did not have words. We lay him down in silence as if death were unexpected and we had nothing to say. A priest without vestments gives the commandment of grief and our tongues are bitter with salt. One by one,…