I’ve left my purse at your place again, my glasses a month ago, last week the necessary book. It isn’t getting any better, the boys, their father. His hands shake like orchids at the sound of my words. The children are terrified. Both have begun to call me Dad. It’s been years I’ve tried to…
My nails, light, on these strings. On roadside wires, far off, shy kestrels Touch down. Clasped in their talons, All tidings hum like insects: the death Of someone dearly loved, the death of love, Aspirations of the young, the lies, the sighs Of businessmen and lovers. They ride Impulses, pounding, that go to drive iron…
Suddenly the photographs that Arthur Rothstein took become alive as movies and I watch the Model A leave behind its dust and pull on up to that storefront weather-worn with its tin porch roof held up by posts I might still carve initials on. In the barber shop that’s Dad’s he’s caught the hair that’s…
(from a novel in progress) Maurice Pelletier, four years old, stood in front of an armoire mirror practicing his solo tap routine to "Anchors Aweigh." No music played. He mouthed the words silently with tiny cherub lips and his ordinary house shoes made muffled slaps on the carpet. He wore a white sailor suit and…
Even close to the end when nothing works except one hand my brother goes to the Special Cases pool where cheerful athletes reposition his puppet bones in a canvas sling scoot him down the ramp into tepid water adjust his flotation collar and cut him loose. Speech has left him, but not joy. I carry…
The day has barely lifted before the rain begins, and I sit down at the desk littered with unanswered letters and look out into the garden abandoned now to ragweed and sour- grass. The gentians we planted have been dead for weeks, but still their stalks turn strangely green, and the spent leaves, too, scattered…
". . . as good an explanation as any for the panic is that all the intelligent people were listening to Charlie McCarthy." – A "prominent social scientist" quoted by Hadley Cantrill in The Invasion from Mars Accounts of this kind often begin by giving you the line on some immediate menace. The geeks are…
After the funeral I pick forty pounds of plums from your tree Earth Wizard, Limb Lopper and carry them by DC 10 three thousand miles to my kitchen and stand at midnight — nine o’clock your time — on the fourth day of your death putting some ravelled things unsaid between us into the boiling…
How close the world feels at this hour: you could almost touch it, leave the cold house as the light slips from the furniture and touch it. On Dodge lovers sit stalled in traffic, thigh grazing thigh so casually only a stranger might notice how their limbs tense and relax, the goose-flesh blooming above her…
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