Contending in memoried turns under its date the tape winds a while longer to mull death over. The hearts of his children have cooled since then, ten years like ten young trees grown to shade. Once teen-aged boys on the hilled grass, young athletes out of shape to lift the coffin of one who dealt…
No wonder it feels like a chore, by the hour, the ounce, the follicle, and no wonder we’d be more bored without our boring jobs than we are on the grayest Monday. It’s work, being depressed, and we’re tired, and we fall asleep and dream and wake like a skim of fat on a broth,…
Hot, sticky night, the moving truck is at the door. Only a few weeks since your death. Your things arrive, the contents of your life spill over mine, disrupting my careful rooms. The moving men stumble up the stairs. I hear myself call, “Put the desk in the bedroom, gentlemen, please.” Already your elaborate courtesies…
Hope in Kingston drives a Volvo that rattles. We’ve missed our turn to the hotel: the soothing quiet flourishing palms, veranda columns, fresh paint and the bulldog asleep under the table while his Aussie master nurses the last night’s drink. No yams or jerky pork except on Wednesday by the pool, white jackets and a…
To be on Zurichberg (the price of gold climbing faster than the #5 tram) to be on Zurichberg where they buried Joyce between the Dolder and the zoo in earshot of a dozen tourist languages and the lions’ roar, to be at Joyce’s grave under a pewter sky returns me to the epiphytes at Kew…
When it snowed hard, cars failed at the hairpin turn above the house. They’d slur off line and drift to a ditch — or creep back down, the driver squinting out from a half- open door, his hindsight glazed by snow on the rear window and cold breath on the mirrors. Soon he’d be at…
For my father In your orange flight suit, you approached the Renault we knew might stall after a hard winter freeze. With your pilot’s hand, you turned the engine. When it caught, I ran down the walkway you had shoveled. Cinderella lunch-box under my arm, I climbed in the frozen capsule, and waited for you…
I lived among a people who said, pig, for luck. They might have said stork or flounder for these beings were familiar to them, as were rat and donkey. But they said, pig. No doubt from ingrained habit. Real pig, fella. Some pig you had, my friend. What pig. Good pig! Hey, have a piggy…
Stilts sink into stiltprints left by the dead child in the soft earth. If his living friend stalks in those holes, if he throws each long crutch stiff-legged ahead of him, will he win the race? One dead foot, one live . . . he hops on bones, a lame pony, a giraffe limping fast…
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