He took off his watch, wound it, undressed. One movement to unfold the blanket. And he remained like that. He had forgotten something. There was something he hadn’t finished. The obstacle: perhaps that red sack on the chair, perhaps the black cap on the trunk. And automatically he turned toward the dark mirror. Inside there:…
Almonds that meet the aroma of horses, and apple orchards in October, oaths sworn in dawn mist, the porgy roaming the ocean floor with one eye open to the sea. I hold you near my elbow, and far away on the mountain you gather the soaked grain that the orphaned Assyrian carries to his mother….
A few humbling things. Outside my real house there’s an actual picket fence, a flowerbox, one shady maple, and a lawn too big to mow. I said I’d never come to this. I said a lot of things. And sulked, tempestuous, as seasons passed, unworthy of fierce attention. My greatest fear: fathers grew fat and…
– But what do you want? – A life. – A life? * * * It's possible to love solitude when you're surrounded by a life-with-others. When there is no life-with-others, ultimate things lose their relative meaning. * * * In folk tales, what we've come to consider the human world, the real real world, is the…
Across an alley, opposite exactly my window: Intensive Care Unit. At night I’ll sit in my dark and stare into its greenly lit lucidity: I can almost read the X-rays hung on the wall — two bad ghost pears, the lungs . . . Plasma bottles glister, beep-machines, a blur of women and men in…
I have seen that moon face rise behind my shoulder in the mirror like a bum floating up from the sidewalk bribing his own disappearance with the reminder that suffering reeks to high heaven. Money’s prayers are always answered. The bums go. Delmore stays behind my shoulder as I shave whispering like a dust pan…
I When Intelligence approaches its goal only to pull back at the prompting of instinct, we stand alerted to something whose charged importance demands that we approach it again. My point of departure comes not from David Jones but rather from an essay of 1979 by Robert Hass on Tomas Transtromer. Several of his sentences…
We only want to count you, boys, to find out who and where you are. We don’t need a draft. We do need to know where we can find you, just for the files. I wouldn’t worry, it would be a lottery, and you are lucky. You might as well go down and sign up…
A blind student lives in the room closet to the courtyard. When he descends with his dog we step deftly out of the way and say hello. He is good and his dog is good but sometimes you gasp as he approaches a curb or a group talking with their backs turned and want to…
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