We’d met by chance. Once. Late at night. Me, off the ship Pireus harbour, banging loudly on your door for entry, shouting in the dark: Fo Fo! Fo Fo! You in there not answering. Busy? A friend? Fo Fo! Open up. It’s only me Fo Fo. Finally the door opens a measure on its chain…
Although I am taking courses in the language of children, penguin socialization and creative writing, now, in my dotage — dotage, what a striking word — I find myself betrayed — betrayed — by what? Betrayed! That’s what it means to be human. First acceptance, then rage, then reiteration. Once dinner was always exactly at…
Robin, I watch you. You are perfect robin — except, shouldn’t you be perched on a spade handle? Robin, you watch me. Am I perfect man — except, shouldn’t I have poison in my pocket, a gun in my hand? I, too, am in my winter plumage, not unlike yours, except, the red is in…
He’s everywhere here; not as he looks in his photos but in his mind, habits — that elegantly refined, withdrawn decadence. I glimpse or pass him everywhere: at night walking quickly down a back alley close to the walls’ shadow, afternoons in a teahouse alone glancing over the edge of his foreign newspaper, the rims…
Trunk, branches, leaves — sere and blemished — I am not what I wanted. Dignity is a hindrance. I am weighted with notions and unbalanced by fear. Night sweats, vapours. Why am I frightened alone on the street? Nothing’s here — a pair of brown squirrels — a few fallen apples — These rococco grimaces,…
I like almost imperceptibles, near still lifes — a limpet sloping full-tilt down a rock: thunder mooching among mountains, trailing delicate diminuendos: a mushroom hoisting a paving slab on its darning-egg head: and the brooch on her dress rising so quietly, so quietly falling. Don’t judge me by that: I like suddennesses too — fistfuls,…
— Wittgenstein, Tractatus The world is everything that is the case From the fly giving up in the coal-shed To the winged Victory of Samothrace. Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God Who hides, shame-facedly, His agèd face; Whose sun retires behind its veil of cloud. The world, though, is also so much more —…
We drive up the winding road lined by graying sycamores, a blessing in the summer heat. At a small table, between the stones, a man and two women nibble crustless sandwiches, pour from a silver pot of tea. They have their arrangements: dour frigidity of gladioli, faded dresses, a musty gentility. We have brought a…
I don’t want to shuffle in a Greek theatre chanting powerful platitudes while Nemesis, off stage, gouges and stabs. Or twangle a harp in an Irish castle while the drunken louts, the great heroes, quarrel over chess or lie with a snake-brained woman. I don’t want to be one of those who paused between the…
No products in the cart.