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The best in life is close to the ground, especially the pain I feel when I hit bottom. But I can start all over again, any time. Climb the ladder, catch my breath. Although I’m getting a little old for this trick, I won’t stop. I wait until sunset when the children go home. Then,…

On another side of the world, vendors hawk skinned rabbits, olives peppered with the dust of cheese. And each of their streetside stalls opens at dawn, closes at dusk, like flowers, like mussels and sea urchins. This, the memory of one foreign city opens also, reappears in a journal entry left neglected in a drawer,…

Walker Evans, No. 1, Walpole, Maine At this congenial house the mailman stops every day, sits on the porch steps knees spread apart and sips hot chocolate or tea or what they call a little something extra. I imagine myself in these upstairs rooms under gabled roofs sitting before a desk covered with shelf paper…

Farmers, my mother would say, need rain. She imagined their raw faces, the green reflections in their eyes, the sound in the cornfields. In the kitchen, my mother carried her lameness around like a loved pet, pulled herself to the window. I sat where I was, my back to my mother, hoping for weather to…

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…

I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even wants the fly while writhing.