“If you sold this place,” says my neighbor, “you could buy a little flat.” A little flat! One with no room for half my books, no stairs to keep my knees in flexible order, one in which on no morning would my eyes open to next door’s silver birch, self-sown in the days of Marjorie…
I think myself thin until a scale calls me to honesty, its numbers the mind of God, unrelenting, and I question a machine that can drive us to uncertainty, to suicide, or into the edges of murder, thinking we are more or less not there or here. One day I walked down a street feeling…
Under her tongue, there was a story. In her mouth, nails. Frances hammered license plates to the back wall of her garage. There hang the years that sunk like a foot in loose soil. That rusted like a hinge. Whose hand or what machine etched the numbers that cruised along in the exhaust of a…
She taught the girl how to roll dough thin, but Frances didn’t teach me. I was too wild to crimp a crust. Once, in a fit, I took off my shoe, raised it above my head, but never meant to throw it. A stranger at the post office recognized someone’s face in my face, noted…
Life, the devil you know, the one you’ve bantered, bartered with, trading this day for that, this love for that freedom, that freedom back for happiness. Something lacking, something gained. The devil is one hell of an investor, turning a profit continuous as flames. You are wood. You are the paper you signed your life…
Love, if you want me to speak, let me find a way out of my sadness. You are everywhere lingering—moss over rock, rock over seed, seedlings about to remember. I recall you in small things and nothing: stones upon water—water turned hard, into rock. Here on the listening lake things burn to be born and…
The smell of her on the book she left behind, the taped tear in the dust jacket, the neatly printed marginal notes, the dog-ears, check marks, underlinings (single and double), the phonetic spelling of the Russian names on the inside of the back cover. Setting it aside I wondered if I had seen too much,…
Current face, new domino in the mirror, it doesn’t look like much now, does it? Has anyone seen the infant? Because of course the infant cannot speak. Has anyone seen the week of early March, 1962, origin of the scar on this chin, scar thinned now and the chin short-whiskered. Trying to slide on concrete…
for Allen Grossman Here’s a side effect that’s very front and center: I am forgetting the words for things. It’s not a matter of mistaking the Ash for the Linden, of conjuring the chickadees to my hand from the Arrowwood. They are a certain kind of medicine like the image of the beech leaves…
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