1. I lived as others do, avoiding death, deploring evils I dared not oppose, and making what I could of the distractions, until I woke one morning with the words: “There shall be neither rain nor dew these years except according to my word; thus saith the Lord” — and I, as one still…
When thinking fails a certain love shrivels when thinking flaps its wings like a confused sparrow the hungry owl is alerted when thinking tries to bully itself a trap door opens onto a coffin lined with gymnastic weights but when thinking steps outside itself . . . cross any border with oxygen your only luggage!
We sit down at the table, with the herbs, the dish of salt, the plates and the broken bread. Everything is in order, everyone in his place peers out like a sentry from his skull, when the door opens and we see the palms of heaven. No one disturbs us, and yet news arrives: we…
(“If Innocent” is from The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty, a book-length collection of monologues spoken by Dr. Matthew Mighty-grain-o-salt Dante O’Connor, the character in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood. O’Connor is an American Irishman from San Francisco, a flamboyantly homosexual, unlicensed gynecologist, and a non-stop raconteur. In “If Innocent” he recalls (for Ignace, his…
Selfless deeds have a way of repaying their doer. for instance, the man, a simple business traveler who rescues a pitiful horse from a mud hole, covers him with his cloak, doesn’t return in the next life as a pony stuck like a bewildered musician in a swamp eyeing people going by with eyes brimming…
On my longest walk I saw the coast’s down-slant three times repeated: in the eaten-under limestone across the channel; the color of hidden candlelight under the chateau, des Lombards; then red in the huge cape — each layer as if wanting to slip undersea, and then another above, the pressure, and the last exploding in…
(Chapter Seven begins with the return of a white sixth grade girl named Mary to her school on the edge of Harlem, after a Christmas marred by fighting between her father and stepmother. During her first months at the school Mary's own withdrawnness, her race, and an episode in which she "ratted" on other children,…
Nothing is and nothing in itself is a mountain. I know nothing except certain brief anecdotes: The wall has bricks. The Navy has cigarettes. The wide world is an old horizon. The chair is flat and without boundaries. There is no reason to call it a chair. But we do, and you know it is…
Ulysses’ shadow dancing with a herd of monsters, winding its paleo-way through corridors half-shed of horse and ibex It winds into a tower Gaudi dreamed children blowing like sky-blue fluff across the roof of a world without straight line or right angle So that the wily meanderer still lives even if in Catholic drag —…
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