Women are right: There must be meaning; and the meaning will die. Men are wrong: They suppose there can be a deathless meaning; or else that there can be joy without meaning. Women know the double truth: There must be meaning; and the meaning will die.
“Soft trees against blue sky.” That is how Mrs. Abernathy described it before she died. “A small barn bent further than my arthritic spine. A white clapboard house, a wood burning stove and a sink you could fall into and land in China.” The autopsy report said pneumonia. It might have included the thousand little…
Chainsaws at dawn beneath a slate gray winter sky as my neighbor’s work crew clear-cuts the small lot behind his house and next to mine, rhododendrons and forsythia, junipers and spruce, and the mass of prickly sweetbriar the cardinals like—despite the rising ground and collection of rocks he wants an expanse of lawn as smooth…
Can we retire from sex just as naturally as we retire from a job? I do not have detailed studies. There is always that time of day when one ceases to pretend. The hotel was decked out with the relics of gaiety. The walls stopped short of the ceiling. There was no air conditioning even…
The older I get the less I’m bothered by seeming incongruity. I read the Gospel of Mark listening to Billie Holiday. A young man runs away naked from the Garden of Gethsemane and Billie sings, “I’m traveling light.” Eventually you find the rhyme for every word. The night is coming—perhaps that’s why— the color that…
when I first woke up, some time after my adolescence, I noticed all the other stars around me were dying—before then I thought I’d live forever—at least now I can talk to you—I can say I have a better understanding of your world, all that business over Eden, all those words used to describe it…
Almost ready, she says as I walk into the drugstore, this strange woman who swivels her neck, to cock her head back at me, while adjusting her bra under her clothes, and I don’t know if she means the rapture, or if she’s waiting for some violence, tires squealing, to drag her off by her…
He almost pitied them, those buried with no fare, as he sifted through the sand of their names and singled out the shades who would be granted no passage. Their breath was all cold-packed earth and mossy hush. How many coins he had now—the wake turned up their light when he fingered them. He tallied…
What with foresight and dancing, gypsies would seem to pass easily between worlds. The hummingbird too— only a moth with a beak— Have I ever heard it hum? Yet it’s everywhere welcome, coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water, for we are devious, in our desires. And the dead, we embody them for our own…
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