1 Erroll, the deputy who was known to litter, did not toss any Fresca cans or Old King Cole bags out this night. Erroll brought his Jeep to a stop in the yard right behind Lenny Cobb’s brand new Dodge pickup. The brakes of Erroll, the deputy’s, Jeep made a spiritless dusky squeak. Erroll was…
When they asked me what happened to my wedding portrait, I lied. I said I destroyed it. Instead, I hid it. Hid it and found it and hid it again. They should have known I couldn’t destroy it. I have had to remove the pictures of people from the walls of my room so the…
By the road in the field they stand, lifting branches they cannot remember, rocking shut in the wind. In some other world they grew such trunks and hurled their leaves across the sky. Now, emptyhanded, they wait for the end which has been happening for years. Nodding off beside telephone wires, tethered to farmhouses, the…
IV. Most of the old buildings are gone now — you can blame fire, or progress, or both. Forensic Hall, known to some as “Frenzy,” built by the students in 1874: demolished before the first World War: Forensic and dancing — thermometer two degrees above zero. The cotillion: Five couples plus two stags, the hall…
New houses relax on the fields. Garage doors open soundlessly to admit the monster. Tires stretched over forty pounds of air pressure float across gravel. The boy closes the last storm door on the last evening paper and runs to the car where his mother waits. She does not answer him; the door slam freezes…
Oddly, being so large gave them a sense of possibility. Women with huge upper arms felt freer. Children never stopped opening the landscapes of flesh that grew in their hands. The few thin ones were called “chinless” because their long faces seemed indistinguishable from their necks. No one knows when they began to seem beautiful,…
Green leaves lit by the sun, the rest deep in shadow . . . a tree is an adequate symbol of inner or spiritual life. (“The natural object,” said E. P., “is always the adequate symbol.”) It wasn’t just characters . . . one heard that successful men, corporation executives, were into transcendental meditation. But…
Always shining with rain, its aftermath or prescient with it — umbrella people natty in sun, but shelter always at the ready. Lovers are folded around each other under gazebos and pavilions in Stephen’s Green — in the lee of the wind behind statues — face on face, the only parts dry the parts of…
1 Across the street Kolkie’s doing his banjo, Mr. Antonelli on the flute. This is how I know it’s Sunday night again, August, and cold. I can just make out their gray old man hair and buttoned sweaters. Weather like this I could be older than the two of them. It’s nineteen years since those…
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