for Stanley Plumly Today, putting on my socks, I noticed, on my right foot, an ugly bunion and sore hammertoes. Overnight, it seemed, my alphabet of 26 bones, 100 ligaments, and 33 muscles had realigned themselves into the jumbled sentence of my mother’s right foot. How did my mother’s foot suddenly become part of me?…
Cavernous, unpeopled, the theater is empty, but its silence pleases him. He wants to mull his former life over, as water would, until it becomes pure, simple, & smooth—an oval of white quartz in the river’s bed of sand & stones. As a child he had collected such stones, but their luster always seemed to…
All my life before him, every word I wrote had heard the notes turning into air above the pages and spinning my desire into jail and joy, or memory of someone not quite gone. Like children in the womb or eggs asleep in a girl’s all possible, the words I gave to paper heard whatever…
Lo! with a little rod, I did but touch the honey of romance— And must I lose a soul’s inheritance? —Oscar Wilde Yes, until proved otherwise: innocent, innocent . . . Not a lover, more a connoisseur of slender works of art. The form of a cat or cat-o’-nine-tails. Or of a long-necked porcelain vase,…
They lived in town, in houses that touched, houses that needed paint, and money for the rent. We never talked of their parents. We didn’t know their families, what they did on Sundays. They were the boys our mothers feared, alien boys, and we the moths drawn to their light. They were the boys who…
They are not lilacs, though their thousand blue torches rise up everywhere on our boulevard and ignite Spring. I have eyes. I know what I see. A symbol of something like love, conflated with that delicate bruise color. Desert blue, arroyo blue, pool shimmer, blue of the jay’s wing gliding south above the aircraft plants….
“Lie down beside me,” I whispered. So we lay on the bed in that room that was the whole world to us. Outside, the innkeeper’s children kicked a soccer ball along the quay. Seagulls flocked and dispersed, and the busy foolish world went about its foolish business. I shut my eyes and we met on…
1. Over and over, I think we have come to a place like this, dead sound stopping the soul in its eager conversations Or, a classical theme repeated over and over interrupted by a voice disguised as human: Please stay on the line Your call is very important to us 2. Don’t know if I…
Two weeks after her husband’s death, just before I left for the airport, my mother said, But how will I get to the lawyer’s on time tomorrow? I said Well you’ll leave the house in plenty of time, she said No no, how will I wake up in time? You’ll set the alarm, Mom, and…
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