He shuttles from me, in Boston, to ex-wife and baby, in Baltimore, to me, to baby. He vacations three weeks alone with baby. He wants to get to know baby. He wants custody of baby. And when he gets custody (last month he shattered a tea cup to prove how certain he is of getting…
I, too, have trailed my father’s spirit From the mud-walled cabin behind the mountain Where he was born and bred, TB and scarletina, The farm where he was first hired out, To Wigan, to Crewe junction, A building-site from which he disappeared And took passage, almost, for Argentina. The mountain is coming down with hazel,…
I cannot worry about what lies beneath the surface, so I walk into the fragile dusk, breaking the backs of field mice still asleep under the snow. The sunlight that does not reach me illuminates the distance between this world and God’s, where winter is simply the white of perfect concentration. I would like to…
Not many years after Professor Alleman began his teaching career, he had a pretty and rambunctious nun as a student. She told him nothing was worth aiming for except sainthood. When he first heard this opinion, he scoffed gravely, arguing that this might be her personal truth but that it had little merit as a…
They’re kindly here, to let us linger so late, Long after the shutters are up. A waiter glides from the kitchen with a plate Of stew, or some thick soup, And settles himself at the next table but one. We know, you and I, that it’s over, That something or other has come between Us,…
I am a word in a foreign language — Margaret Atwood I am a word in a foreign language, but I don’t know what the word is, so I sit here quietly, an alien to my name. Around me, the hedges rustle. Finches settle on the roof, unaware that nothing has changed, that the…
The van was always cool, even on the hottest days, and when they started it grew cooler still as the wind whipped through the open windows and pelted his naked body. It delighted Isaac to be up so high and to be going so fast, to look down on pedestrians dawdling by the roadside, then…
They were out coursing on Sunday a last time together but they did not know it, the two friends, James Sharkey and Tom Lennon, a teacher and an agricultural instructor. The weak winter sun had thawed the fields soft enough to course the hare on, and though it still hung blood-orange above the hawthorns on…
Strangled women rot in cellars near Dudley Station, ghost after ghost complaining. Guilt of flesh sours me, there are no clues. Terror drools in rags from jagged mouths of busted windows as I stroll past to visit a friend, the last white dude on the block. I ought to scream for the dead who can’t…
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