At thirty-nine each apple reminds me of some other. The memory lives in objects: fallen from trees or baked like pie. I kiss my daughter and remember my own face kissed. All Broadway music is from a play I saw with my father when his eyes were fine. Certain words or smells evoke the faces…
after Horace Odes I.11 However candid, wise, courageous, and charming the neurologist, it was surely a mistake for her to say that thirty years might stretch ahead of me living with who I lived with. And yet I had asked her, silly as Leuconoe. Scire nefas! Besides, how could she tell quem mihi finem…
The turning of the pages of a magazine in the middle of a morning sends waiting-room echoes through the quiet house, echoes that are making us old. The routines that hold us closer to them and this sense that steady notice is being taken of us somewhere now, this is making us old and the…
Rather, it is in the shorter history of America, not England, not Italy, that we find ourselves in the perfect middle of a rainy summer afternoon inside a 1930s shingled boathouse long since beached on a low hill out of water’s reach, and plumbed and electrified for habitation. No effort has been made to hide…
Were the earth a skull, the lump at its base would read to Victorian doctors as amativeness: connubial love, procreative lust. And where the peninsula stretches up toward Patagonia a smidge of philoprogenitiveness, parental love, a fondness for pets and the generally helpless. Jules Dumont d’Urville, man of his times, had his own skull mapped…
Ann Arbor V.A. Hospital Black matter, black hole, blacker than charcoal, tar, crow in winter, blackest thing I’d ever seen, thirty years later the blackest thing I’ve ever seen, that thin black leg below the still-white thigh angling from the veteran’s hospital gown the way person, place and time long ago angled away from his…
“Someone stole my name,” a girl sobs, pigtails cinched with blue rubber bands. I want to name the bus we wait for, Huff, the wind, What? Inferno, sigh the fried potatoes whose scent drifts in from a luncheonette. Who stole the land where potatoes first were sown? Who stole the vernacular of ancestors? And that…
She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…
We refused to obey the law and scatter your ashes a full mile offshore: you had asked for the tiderocks— chain of islets, really, off the point, where the sea explodes most crystalline; but walkable at low water— after a handful were buried on my father’s grave. What childhood foot-memory kept me steady, the square…
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