Article

The Dream, The Tool

1 You need the woman wearing blue to remind you of the future. Her body has the shape of it. You need the movement of a wrist turning in its sleeve capable unlocking air. The bone, the tool turning under the skin unlocking the skin. The bone, a mineral of light unlocking and you remember…

Maybe a Bird

What sings the holy language of meaningless music? Maybe some kind of a bird, I think. What knits the invisible patterns that fasten the sky? I think maybe some kind of bird. What circles above the dying? I think a bird of some kind. What darkens everything in the shadow of a wing? Some kind…

Dialogue

1. Ulysses to Calypso I think I’m looking for Ithaca, not myself. My heart, brain, ivory bones below the surface might be pearls to serious girlfriends, but I consider myself an onion, not an oyster. You might get wise by staring at your face in the water, listening to Sirens, asking the dead in hell…

The Marsh

You make yourself new again. Along your sides, only a thin line marks the scar where you lay open one whole summer. Steam rises from your body in this heat. You move slowly you sit up to your chin in yourself. One morning you are a blue floor. You are rising, you are learning to…

Chapter 2, Bettina

Phipp’s wife, Bettina Feather Phipps, was convalescent on a blue-striped chaise from the impositions of her daily life: “And cook, who should be legally barred from cooking for others, preparing my lunch of native asparagus on triangles of toast— the slight relief in my semi-invalid’s regime— curdled the bechamel and burnt the toast, and served…

Letter for a Daughter

Put it this way, lovey, some people stab themselves with their own strength: stubbornly clinging, when all the best of collective wisdom, not just your parents, but your friends, too—calls up the feral outline of a lover that love for yourself should let you let go. Thinking about it, I had it all so clear…

Questions

If I look to the stars for answers it seems the stars have troubles of their own. Each night finds them regrouped into new constellations that leave me worse than before: dumbfounded, perplexed. I knew how to read once the flight of crows; a pig’s gut had, on occasion, given valuable information and the bleached…

After

After the month in Sicily, the ocean’s edge unravelling around our own volcanic knees; after the dark plums that throbbed like fairy tale hearts in the woodsman’s basket; the voyage in another’s arms where we were innocent as tourists visiting familiar landscapes for the first time we come back to our old lives as to…