The sun’s leached everything, the last dream of heading for some Greek island, the sea blue there as in March, or October. The rain gave out over a month ago. In mind are only the other summers, and my hands, calloused, fit the hands of a friend drowned eight, nine years back in the Wisconsin…
His arms are thin in the lamplight on the long table. Floods of yellow and amber light holding the June roses in suspension with him, his tan touched with a few scabs of baseball. A bead of blood has loosened itself from his wrist and glints like a ladybug as he turns it in the…
He wonders why you keep postponing the party when you have to do all the cooking. One night, it rains for three weeks. Brown water drips from the ceiling and the coq au vin tastes like plaster. His guests raise an eyebrow and he wonders why you don’t just serve the mousse, unflappable as Vogue…
In Durer’s Melancholia a spell nails things to the floor, nothing can travel. The woman with idle wings sits to brood, laurel leaves in her hair. Some tools are spewed at her feet—hammer, saw, nails. A marble block in the background waits for a chisel. In the clutter of the room the hourglass glares like…
The absurd has its reasons which the reason absorbs: now the outlines throb when you draw, and the decade of sight left you will leave you diligently vulnerable to the long littleness of life, who revealed so little else— for you humanity was definable broadly by its weaknesses or narrowly as your crayon could encroach…
The power was off. We cleared dishes from the table. Shutters crashed against the windows. Below us, in the lake, the minnows were in a frenzy. Limbs cracked like knuckles—one great trunk smashed to the ground. Leaves flew past, pasted themselves to the panes. Somewhere, my father was on a train. The blue walls quaked,…
(For W.C. Williams and Hoyt Wilhelm) to govern so the concrete in motion with the most tenuous of grips to force as much by will as act the erratic to hold within a predetermined form to summon with an easy minimalist grace the capacity repeatedly to baffle: it is the haven of the fortunately old,…
A dusky cloud, a tree, a giant (caught on the line of magnification) deeply whorled hand from the group at the center. A picturesque little house with watersteps and a boat, momentarily forsaken. You can see its boatman down by the lagoon with two others, pointing deeper into the painting with a shrewd air of…
Did your mother ever wear a hat with a whole bird’s nest growing on it, or a dress patterned with naked bodies? Remember how long the street seemed then, how you stepped behind her to investigate a fence post, shop window, blade of grass, anything to let you fall behind? Perhaps she was an immigrant,…
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