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…
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,…
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