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The Elephant’s Decision

A painter sat down at his table with a dusty canvas before him. On the other side of his studio, his easels stood like a forest. Each one represented a birthday or Christmas in which a relative had come up with the perfect gift. But because he was the type of artist that liked to…

Thinking Big

Sometimes I have to think big, bigger than an airplane hanger, bigger than Lake Erie, bigger than nitroglycerin. When I think that big, I stand in a field and look down for a long time, my crackerbox boots are clumsy continents, I ignore them and look instead at a stone. It is cold, grey and…

Rigor Vitus

I walk On human stilts. To my right lower leg a man is locked rigid To my left a woman, lifelessly strapped I have to heave them up, Heft them out but they’re so heavy Seems all my strength Just to take the begin step All my past to broach a future. And so on…

Just Like Everybody Else

Little Bertha Venation would have been the most exquisite young woman of her century, were it not for her distressing tendancy to cheat on her lovers with other men, for a yes, for a no, sometimes not even for a yes or a no. At the time this story begins, her lover was a splendid…

Inheritance

for Martha A young woman rows to the middle of the river, and plays the violin her father gave her just before he died. She keeps time with her foot, making a wonderful noise on the bottom of the boat, like tapping on a rainbarrel, or a whale’s heartbeat. She plays until almost night. As…

Wind and Soup

For six days I’ve been re-heating soup. The bird in the soup never flew, never complained unless you would call the red flesh of his head a complaint. I ask my son where we come from. He says the wind. When he couldn’t fly he told me little people helped him pour darkness into holes….

Como

Tiresomely, in prose, long ago great-sonneting Berryman said that in Heart of Darkness the Congo stood for a private part, specifically a vagina, to Marlow. Now, I find that perverse, if I had to say. The continent was mysterious, the river led into its mystery, ok. But Marlow (and Conrad before him) could tell a…

Reflections

I can remember writing Lie Down in Darkness in total belief, at the age of 23 to 26, that somehow. . .I was contributing my share to the human race – but in such organ-like tones. There was great music droning through my mind as I wrote it, and I think it's a pretty good…