Nonfiction

Greens Start simply. Lettuce green (light). Collard green (dark). Endive (deep thick white). Lettuce green (red at the curling edges). Lettuce green (with a spine of white). Mustard green (lace-spice). Cabbages, kales, and Brussels sprouts (yellow past their prime). And escarole (and oh . . .). Endive (the thick white). Greens are my delight. Swiss…

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…

Cold. Wet. Sloppy. Traffic on the bridge is heavy even though I waited for morning rush hour to end. Perhaps there is no end to rush hour. Fax. E-mail. Supersonic jets. We’re all racing at greater and greater speeds, going around and around, stuck behind each other on the bridge. Except Mom, who in her…

When we ran out of money, the paintings worked like magic. My father would take one down from the pair of nails it hung on and would carry it-his face close to the portrait's face-to his creditor's car. He told the few facts he had been told about the artist's life, a name changed from…

Sometime in the early 1880s a medical doctor named Israel Wood Powell, superintendent for Indian Affairs for Coastal Indians in British Columbia, collected a raven rattle from the Tshimshian Indians. He sent the rattle to The American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it remains. It is a percussive musical instrument, used…

           . . . The border Halves a piece of paper into here and hereafter. A man, himself a fascicle of borders, draws a map and can't stop       drawing For fear of bleeding, smudging, disappearance. When the map is complete the page will be completely Obscured by detail, then a third howl. Three things…