I like the way wasps always put me in mind of washing, when the summer was bright and the shade fell in stripes from the shutters. Then the blood runs swift in its vessels, the spots on vipers’ skins seem sharper. Even brambles grow venomous, women stroll down to the shore to watch in the…
I meant to be neutral until I saw the doors battered with axes and the windows gone. I thought the town would be just a town, fountains, public buildings, throngs of shoppers, drinkers in the pubs. The party walls between houses stood, their fireplaces open to the sky; and groups of men in caps and…
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…
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