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…
The ceremony was in a side chapel, with Howard giving her away, and Mary matron of honor, and Susan flower girl, and David (their new baby, which she'd helped to care for first few days, but Louie hadn't seen) crying in Nancy's arms, so Mary had to take him back; and Frank best man, and…
Earth-spirit, wood-spirit, stone, father, Other, exposed root I said goodbye to by the river, where are you now? I fondle a glass eye. The eye reflects leaves, stars, galaxies. . . . Space was always my demon, the unreachable. From a black hole a wavering flute song, readable.
Bitter words whispered in a railroad station. A hair caught in a wallet’s web. Then: stroll the streets the way the poets did or some novel character musing after night’s revels, clutching a glove, a bit of silk, a talisman of disillusion. On Rue Huchette a gypsy breathes fire for spare change. Acrid whips of…
Nothing ever seemed to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but never doing especially well,…
(for Kate) It’s the one thing you’ve asked for — your medicine now, not hours from now, on the way home, after this new rigmarole of your x-rays, tests, upstairs, downstairs — but I simply can’t find a drugstore. Back at the clinic, I can’t even find you again — I’m shown to still another…
The moon clouds over and is done. The Polish crones roam Mutual Tower spitting, polishing, sifting the trash for small gifts their grandchildren will turn into trash. Deep in the folds of the dark, some poor infant cries and cries for comfort and will not be calmed. Under the police siren’s wail it continues, clearing…
When you are young you are two-dimensional. Everything has a front and a back, but there is no depth. When you turn sideways to examine something, you skitter and fall like a kite. So Kimball thought when he started teaching college thirty years ago, at a time when business was good and teachers were scarce….
1 Hey, Joe When my sister was in college whenever she wrote a paper she’d sit there picturing her teacher reading it collapsing with derision rushing to phone a friend — “Hey, Joe — ya gotta hear this one!” She’d go on about this fantasy to a friend of ours, who, around this time, got…
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