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…
For you it was not much of a time, and you sat calmly waiting for it to end and dissolve you on into the walk through wind back to the office building; waiting for it to be past and just a dim memory of a long table of vaguely chuckling faces; waiting for this one…
He stood with his cap in his hand, very conscious of the mud on his wellingtons because she had somehow suddenly looked down at them as if they smelled. She stood with her hand on the key in the door, her school books under her arm, looking directly at him so that he dropped his…
Sap withdraws from the upper reaches of maples; the squirrel digs deeper and deeper in the moss to bury the acorns that fall all around, distracting him. I’m out here in the dusk, tired from teaching and a little drunk, where the wild asters, last blossoms of the season, straggle uphill. Frost flowers, I’ve heard…
for E.B., 1911-1979 We had to hurry to catch the open silver train that jingled the rim of the park. It was early, Sunday, summer-hazy, and we imagined we were the only ones around: only also the quick Catalonian boys — jumped from the red hibiscus hedge, and ran along the rail, and grabbed expertly…
He told me, at eleven, that he was angry at women and though he didn't blame them exactly, he'd been driven to the point where he just made himself presentable enough to get laid once in awhile. I thought he was very presentable and I wasn't surprised when I found out later in the evening…
Beside the rocking horse, for which she has grown too large, and the shirts that hang still on the line, she looks down. The face is dour and pale with something private, and will not admit the journalist, up from Boston for country color. How well she knows these hills — green receding unaccountably to…
“Surely in a brutal job-ridden, Puritanical, Billy Grahamized America, poetry of pleasure, describing the six or seven lovely things you did that day, is a victory of sorts.” —Robert Bly For instance planting the seed called six or seven, lovely in itself, borderline, especially considering the six or seven layers of sleep we had…
No products in the cart.