Walking, late at night or just around dawn, I stop for a few minutes outside a friend’s house and wonder about him and his wife upstairs sleeping, not trying the weather like me. I know they keep usual hours; in their house down the hill from me, I see their lights go out most midnights…
She waited while he drank his loss away, now makes him drink his medicine, won’t let him stay alone. It could be me, she says, his saint, his caryatid. She grows gardenias in a window box two floors above the garbage. She is the Minnesota farm, the miles she walked to school, black bread she…
He sits there, staring into the keyboard— baggy rented tux; sagging shoulders; limp hair nearly brushing the keys— hesitating to begin. His eyes glazed, as if he’d been up a week on Coca Cola and pills; a Coke bottle (giant-size) half-empty…
(from a novel to be called: Nothing Happens in Carmincross) Below them is the sweep of the valley, widening from nothing in the grey-brown mountains down to deep green pasture-land. The river winds in the most approved style. The farmhouses are square and white and solid. No poverty in this part of the world. Never…
Emptying the teapot of tealeaves I moped at the kitchen sink: Thinking of thinkers who think that they are the only thinkers who think. The teapot was red enamel and the daylight outside was dark And the appletree at the end of my cabbagepatch was peering back up at my cottage Quite unable to budge…
Wanting leads to worse than oddity. The bones creak like bamboo in wind, and strain toward a better life outside the body, the life everything has that isn’t human. Feel the chair under you? What does it want? Does lust bend it silly like a rubber crutch? Tell a tree about the silky clasp of…
She re-enters her life the way a parachutist re-enters the coarser atmosphere of earth, exchanging the sensual shapes of clouds for cloud-shaped trees rushing to meet her, their branches sharp, their soft leaves transitory. She notices smells, the scent of pines piercing the surface of memory— that dark lake submerged in pines in which her…
Spain frightened you. Spain where I felt at home. The blood-raw light, The oiled anchovy faces, the African Black edges to everything, frightened you. Your schooling had somehow omitted Spain. The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum. You did not know the language, your soul was empty Of the signs, and the welding light…
Here I am on a cross-channel ferry: I have run away from Co. Kerry: I could not stand it another day: But well I know there will be hell to pay. Girls in Dublin reading “Roots”: Girls in London reading “Roots”: Girls in Paris reading “Roots”: Eyed by silent herds of screaming brutes. Outside the…
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