We shelter best that which destroys us. Language. Speaking to the other is like this: standing on a small raft; baskets of apples to balance it; a murder of crows downstream. There are no maps of the waters that cross through this house. A shut door does no good. Even pots with lids…
Braced against the worst gusts yet this summer astride the promontory’s highest ridge, breathless we stare out across sea-glare into distance diaphanous as mist. * Wind-whirred grass buzzes our ankles here where temples rise bone-bright through blood worship with a view. The present scatters roughly like whitecaps on a sea-face. * We…
There is not so much water here as pollen. A lesson in obedience, in Victorian industry: I am busy, busy therefore the child will live. Sheets blossoming like crucified roses. I beg the silk of a single petal. Am denied. You will not need this currency for your particular journey. I return to the stove….
When the hook-and-ladder truck took the corner far too fast, on two wheels, say witnesses, for 70 feet, and then went over, screaming on its side for 90 more, my friend, the reference librarian, was in the back of the truck, knocking around like an overripe peach in a coffee can thrown down thirteen stairs;…
For what it’s worth, once I left the convent, but I never left the Church. It’s true, I left Ireland in a hurry, too. You could say I broke the habit, or to quote my da’ “I pulled a rabbit out o’ my arse” and realized I put the cart before the horse and wasn’t…
Bruno came up to the girl at the bar and she was already talking halfway out of one side of her mouth while, he knew it, looking at him with one eye at least through the smoke she dropped everywhere from the chatted cigarette and the pointed nails, and he knew it was all falling…
Loss and ruin grind under our feet like spilled salt, bad luck sticking to our soles. And joy streaks across the sky, a star burning out. Who knows what will save us? A man yanks the hair of a woman he once covered with kisses. Each kiss was a blossom and he thought he was…
Here are boys, still weak. When they speak snow falls from their lips. Pale of hand and cheek, the motors that whirred in their chests have failed. + Their new city—buildings like a scrim a god unfurled for them so it waves in the wind. + Lovely, strange, and chill. The boys are…
The heart of the builder the wild talent, the so-called genius of the artist is largely overrated. He has been building walls for 60 years now. Two things are important. Endurance (Strength is useful but overrated; leverage can accomplish at least as much as the imprecision of brute force), and material, the second thing, even…
Winter 1990-91 - Digital