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…
She had first seen him wearing sweat socks bunched down between the first and second toes of each foot to accommodate black rubber thongs. She associated this foot garb vaguely and incorrectly with an Eastern religion. She noticed he was prettier than she. He was nice to her because he was nice, and she imagined…
At night he stands poised on a white hillside planting his poles. Below him the fringes, firs, and small alarms, the maples. He takes a short breath, lungs burning, sets off. The mountains are watching, gliding along with him. There are no sounds but those of skis scraping, his own breath as he turns, effortful,…
The skin we didn’t ask for, skin of weather which keeps up shivering in Gorky. . The question is whether to greet it like the Afghan peasant walking barefoot through snow or open an umbrella, take a crash course in camouflage, learn to ski. The skin of place which wears the landscape, glows with an…
Only Colors The little green car came down the hill with a natural parabolic kind of grace, like a sandwich cookie rolling down a string someone has stretched from an upstairs window to the corner of a garage. Only, who was wading barefoot in a stream as wide as a sidewalk that ran along the…
I thank these Kinsmen of the Shelf — Misreading Dickinson I thought I had discovered there A phrase that said it all: “These Kinsmen of the Self.” We know them, lose them, Discover them again, discover Yet more kinsmen, and the self Survives, growing more fragile And more brutal at the selfsame Time. She knew,…
Thrown swallows, called to the delirious Probate of March, declare the unfinishable Resumed and teeming among the stopped towers, Near the plaque for a boy gunned down At the street’s turning, and they shrill their choice Of the entangling covenant, although Each plummet from the topslide of their arcs Obeys a command also. The call…
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