One eye streaming in a cold wind of cows thin windows, animal- thighed men with daughters that crouch the fields like rabbits. Snow mounts the measuring side of the white church shuttered at the crossroad. Flat, there are no wrinkles to read, to bring the horizon near. Nothing under the noncommittal sky but a staunch…
My mother was in the midst of making the beds. The windows were thrown open and the sheets and blankets and pillows were piled up on top of the radiator cover in front of the open windows. A vigorous bedmaker, my mother stripped the beds of their sheets and blankets with an assaultiveness that was…
Don’t let them tell you — the women or the men — they knew me. You knew me. Don’t let them tell you I didn’t love your mother. I loved her. Or let them tell you. Do you remember Rye? — where the small fishing boats, deprived of the receding sea, took the tide out,…
The morning flared the color of blossoming sage fixed in the season’s first heat. Thick with sediment the river flowed over its banks quieting the flats that were always rasping with tiny life. I could still see the circle of rocks, lucid and smudged, where so many times I kindled fires with my son. I…
Elaine looked once more into the mirror, pushing her cheek up with her fingers into a forlorn, lopsided smile. Her palms were wet from brushing her hair. The locker room smelled of rain. The lights flickered; thunder crashed and the sky turned violet. She wiped her palms on her leotard. I can't dance; the dance…
Let me tell you What nothing means. In the boy’s room At the grade school, I stood before the urinal — I was ten, I think — And there before The absolute whiteness Of the cool fixtures, While my pale urine Smacked the porcelain And fell down In the narrow plumbing, I stared straight At…
You have to stop thinking of the 4th of July As a time to bang pots in the back yard And watch for rockets. You can’t expect The food just to be handed to you Hot off the charcoal. You have to stand and talk Through the rippling air to the host with the fork…
At eighteen when I worked in Oology, in the Egg Room on the fifth floor, stabled above the door that read Nabokov: Entomology where we looked at tarantulas all during lunch— nature, far from being in me, or something I was “of,” was the courtyard I walked down into, the air a relief from formaldehyde…
Walker Evans, No. 2, Scarborough, New York A photograph of destruction without disaster: the slow disengagement of plaster, wood, brick and concrete. One layer strips away from another while ivy that has come up like a poisonous weed guards the edge of the crumbled wreck. The remnant sections of these two walls take the direct…
No products in the cart.