This is no way to live, unscrewing the carburetor each morning, sticking a screwdriver into its butterfly valve to let the air in manually. You could stick all I know about cars into a thimble: my car is sick, it’s old and it’s rusted. And although this Japanese vehicle is not my own personal body…
1. Hearing of Your Illness I went out from the news of your illness like a broken bone. I spoke your name to the sickle moon and saw her white wing fall back toward the blackness, but she rowed deep past that hesitation, and kept rising. Then I went down to a black creek and…
“This man arrives in the village without dogs.” How could he travel that far in winter without dogs? “You figure it. And he walks right over to Billy Mwoak. He says, `When you wake up tomorrow morning if you move the wrong way all your bones will break.’” All of them. “So Mwoak couldn’t sleep,…
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…
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