I am a fictional character. However, you would be in error to smile smugly, feeling ontologically superior. For you are a fictional character, too. All my readers are except one who is, properly, not reader but author. I am a fictional character; this is not, however, a work of fiction, no more so than any…
I don’t know. They are young, their souls are undeveloped. My own soul is no bigger than a thumbnail, my own soul at 42 is a half-moon on a thumbnail for one of those towns that fit in a crystal globe where anybody can shake down snow. There’s an opening for God in those towns….
It tries to come out of the paper and tear at me With its spider hands and its feet like rakes And its eyes like red targets and its green hair in flames And something else blue and sun-like with rays that Rebecca says Is a vagina. Annie With the Blue Vagina. Though when my…
On the day that his brother Nachman died, Nathan Malkin, a wealthy sixty-four year old American, was walking along the beach of a nature sanctuary in Israel. He did not find out about his brother's death until three days later, when he returned to his home in Ein Karem, a small village near Jerusalem, and…
What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor? We walk the dirt road toward town through the clear evening. The sky is apricot behind the black cane. Pink above, and dull raspberry on the Turkish hills across the water. The Aegean is light by the shore, then dark farther out. I cannot distinguish…
While history is unforgiven . . . Delmore Schwartz Daughter stands with her hands in her furs. She has told Dad about her nude modelling, has the check to cash. Dad himself has seen naked women standing as if their lovers’ paws had just left their hips, caressing them to their smoothness. He’s seen them…
I used to dislike shopping, the rushing to too many stores, all the details to remember. Now it's almost pleasant. I shop in the morning when the stores are uncrowded and the early light gleams off the beige brick and glass of the store-fronts. Since Joshua and Miriam are grown and gone, there's less to…
The highway was dark, strung with cats’-eyes, red and yellow, passing My window where my face floated; I watched Your face above the steering wheel, as always, calm to the bone; Your brown eyes and full lips droop, but the sadness is genetic only; The space beside your eyes is like a smooth pool. We…
The Seraphim, whose eyes are jewels, read the Inferno of Dante Alighieri anagogically, without weeping. Justice is a simple thing for them, fluttering in their empty robes. But I once wandered through the Wood of Suicides with a girl who thought Pietro delle Vigne had a perfect right to his own flesh even when he…
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