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Such insignificance: a glance at your record on the doctor’s desk or a letter not meant for you. How could you have known? It’s not true that your life passes before you in rapid motion, but your watch suddenly ticks like an amplified heart, the hands freezing against a white that is a judgment. Otherwise…

     James Wright, b. 1927, Martin’s Ferry, Ohio;           d. 1980, New York City. Early spring in Ohio. Lines of thunderstorms, quiet flares, on the southern horizon. A doctor stares at his hands. His friend the schoolmaster plays helplessly with a thread. I know you have put aside your voice and entered something else. I like to…

Lineage had nothing to do with their renown, Mrs. Sanborn wrote: “Twas ever personality that counted at Sewanee. (Her subject was Sewanee dogs.) If money meant more than we feel it will in Heaven, — it does that when lacking. Family, dear to “all sorts and conditions,” remained a point of pride. As in any…

In 1936, a child in Hitler’s Germany, what did I know about the war in Spain? Andalusia was a tango on a wind-up gramophone, Franco a hero’s face in the paper. No one told me about a poet for whose sake I might have learned Spanish bleeding to death on a barren hill. All I…

in darkness, a path we try to avoid and can’t. You don’t descend glistening out of another atmosphere. You’re handmade — mine or hers or his — part of the past we’re handed without asking, pulled out of its gone wholeness, chewed up, spit out, a relic, shard that’s worked its way into the field,…

A man who works in our bank tells me, because I have a Dutch name, that in the war his battalion liberated Maastricht. “We all went back years later, and the people gave us a real celebration. . .” A weekend in Maastricht! Pastry shops in ancient grey buildings. Our host, whose arm was paralyzed…

I. Insomnia The bulb at the front door burns and burns. If it were a white rose it would tire of blooming through another endless night. The moon knows the routine; it beats the bushes from east to west and sets empty-handed. Again the one she is waiting for has outrun the moon. II. Old…

Two old friends, dead too early. September. And then May. Now here, July, high mid-                 July: the lettuce tidal with dew, the hedge grown tall with cedar waxwings. A ruby-throat holds in mid-air,      sipping long at the feeder. Given death, our fortune is to live the life the dead left without words, to take…

It becomes cold and colder the year has no color in it little Dimitri plays the piano until his fingers stiffen with cold. Cold in the line waiting for bread six hours make us patient thin animals waiting as though bread is an unfamiliar food a kind of miracle we hardly expect. We give it…