Love is the hardest rock and the fragile, brine-drenched ships, love is the other ship of rock, the untraveled, yet thousand-times traveled ship on the highest seas — oh the chafing of patience — with love I fashioned death, with love also my work; I went down — he said — to the town market,…
That night was nothing we knew. We’d never seen such stars, not even there, in Texas. My mother held the sky maps and leaned so far back she fell. She wasn’t hurt. Nothing can hurt her, I thought, who didn’t know, and aimed my flashlight at the night, and shot. A long way from here…
In advance, much deconstruction and rebuilding. You guess what each part must do at a crucial moment then memorize the whole. If every click is not dreamlike you take it down again. Much bathing of stars and rings and springs in clear solvents. Letters with numbered codes and curious names go out at night to…
We’ve read much, we’ve forgotten much. Afterward we unlearned all we had learned — what lead and what gold seals — forgeries, counterfeits, rub outs with a razor blade, a penknife, with gum erasers or a fountain pen; and the new script spreading on the parchment, betraying the usurper of others’ perogatives and titles, the…
* Is it for me to call her by her name, she at whose command the air is blessed tonight and the roads lie without the slightest ounce of perturbation Ezi di mma? Or is it for me to hold back from all such mention of her name and let what is sheltered rest as…
In our house it’s still dark, the shapes of furniture indistinct, but my attention drifts out the window, I’m vaguely happy keeping vigil at the stove. One moment the sun is shining, the next a wet snow saturates the hills. Dark clouds set the pack of dogs barking, the cows start their slow ride to…
from Island Lives Although this memoir honors an Original and only secondarily anatomizes an Adventuress, the fellow traveller will want to know why I wished to kill my father, Philip Turner, who was not even a bad sort. For the answer we must look down my private fork of the Kaplan-Turner genealogy, back to the…
When you enter this country, it will seem familiar. There will be trees — elms? maples? — with the dense foliage of August afternoons in the old part of town. But in that field you can see in the distance, green stalks have just surfaced above the mud and water — is it rice? bamboo?…
The woman on the other side of the evergreens a small boy is hidden in, I’m wearing valleys, clear skies, thawing banks narcissus and hollow reeds break through. It means the world to him, this flat archaic fabric no weather worries. Each time I bend, brushing my hair, a bird has just dipped through its…
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