Nonfiction

For my mother’s fortieth birthday, my father brought home two coats-a Persian lamb and a karakul-and told her to choose between them. She set the boxes on the dining room table and opened the first. When she lifted the coat from the box, the tissue paper fluttered upward like a wing. She tried it on…

It is men who carry the dead in our religion, but my sister and I are adamant and my mother accedes. Stepping over hillocks of soiled snow, my sister and I walk on opposite sides of the casket, borne also by nephews and uncles. The wood digs into my fingers, cuts grooves in the pillows…

Where is the Life we lost in living? -T. S. Eliot When America died, I was passed out and I never noticed. Was it a meteor or an invisible wand that waved past our eyes and blinded everyone? I awoke one morning and electrical maggots were spurting from the mind-control machine in our disheveled living…

Words sat up and behaved when James Merrill was around. Whether poetry or prose, Merrill’s writing always sounded like it fell from a tree, perfect from the start. His memoir, A Different Person, was no exception. In it, Merrill explored his early life as a young poet, a dutiful son, and a gay man in…

There is a new black woman in the English department. Several people told me about her, that she is extremely nice, and that she looks white-like me. The way they described her, I didn’t know what I’d see, though I think I thought to myself, Another “nice” light-skinned girl who knows how to make people…

Plants & Houses (Northern Thailand) Several months after I come to live in the house, I begin to realize that nothing in the compound exists without effort or purpose. The lush, tangled gardens surrounding us serve as constant reminder that until only recently the neighborhood belonged to the encroaching forest. The house, a perfect cube…

In the practice of my trade, as writer and teacher, I lie by omission, I sometimes think, as much as I tell the truth. I note, for an eager, untalented first-year student, that her story is interesting, that it shows terrific energy, that there’s some marvelous insight here into waking up hungover on Saturday morning…

When my mother was a teenager, she kept scrapbooks on Marlon Brando and Ingrid Bergman. She pressed their photographs, magazine clips, and movie stills behind cellophane like dried flowers, and wrote them fan letters which they never answered. Recently, a boy I once baby-sat had “Guns ‘n’ Roses Lives” tattooed on his right shoulder blade….

Not long ago I accompanied a Trappist abbot as he unlocked a door to the cloister and led me down a long corridor into a stone-walled room, the chapter house of his monastery, where some twenty monks were waiting for me to give a reading. Poetry does lead a person into some strange places. This…