Article

We begin the long climb. Every few yards you put the hill between us like someone moving furniture. Above, there is the castle tightening its splendid fist of rock. We turn to watch the prisoners’ children journey from their school across the fields. Their heads are shaved, they wear blue smocks and holding hands approach,…

1 It can be fun, it can be grotesque. Also, it can be great. Most people agree on this; a few toughened anti-romantics will never say it out loud; it’s the truth; but it’s also true that often it isn’t even good — the demon of poor timing hops into bed and screws you both….

A shopkeeper ruffles an awning. It is 5 o’clock, quiet, except where children play a block away. Poor dogs, they start to want to die. At the corner a vendor interrupts our embrace with cries of “knives, knives.” Two strangers, meeting again after seven years. Is it possible to be transformed? I speak to silence…

Intimate agonies should be wordless as birds, small dull birds in dark scary woods, but they don’t care how they talk or what beasts inside they become to break out. The wind through those woods grows with them, humming all night beneath hearing like wire inside a building, a wind pressing so gently you’d think…

Someone you don’t know parks his blue pickup in front of your house and sits there smoking; then he drinks something, and sure enough, pretty soon, a small, anxious looking woman with black hair shows up, her rings and fancy coat at odds with everything— but who cares? They kiss, look around, kiss again, then…

By coincidence, the summer of this pregnancy is the time when the scientists choose, once and for all, to find the Loch Ness monster. I read this morning they are using sonar, a useful tool, the obstetrician tells me, for gauging maturity by determining the size of the head: “So there won’t be any surprises.”…

     for my brother You were five. It inhabited your clothes in the closet, or flopped by the shell lamp that jittered on the ceiling. You screamed when I caught it in my trout net where it clicked and gagged and laced itself into the trammel, its mouth a lipstick heart on a gorilla’s face. You…

The peasants know bread, how it breaks beneath their hands, the long, thick nails that harden and sprout like the splayed hooves of their horses. In the fields they bend to lift stones, heavy loaves their plows have turned. Brown is the earthen smell, brown the faces and hands of workers in the weather’s oven….

     —for James G. Davis He had a good job the kid was no problem and when he compared the way his parents had to live this was nothing, a picnic and like he told his wife all he really had to do was relax, hang loose, learn to take things easy . . . but…