Somewhere there is order, a multiverse of order. I could have sewed that rip in the lining with special strong thread, washed pillows for the refugees, cut new gardenias to replace the yellowed blouses collapsed in the vase, called someone, hoping they’d be happy to hear from me. I could have faced the hard time…
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come. —Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense” I’m here, listening to the sound of oars dipping and dripping while they pull across the…
I am successfully cupping fireflies with my make believe hand. I am admiring the invisible irises I forgot to plant last November. I actually see the tie-dye evolution of autumn leaves for the first time My son said after we left the hospice where my mother would be A ghost before we ever saw her…
Contrails crisscrossing overhead, spreading puff by fading puff into each instant of the past… dull notes, antiphonal clouds lined out against the blue, arpeggios down that road as far as we can hope to go… …
She was the stain in the teacup that spread up toward the handle. She was the handle that snapped off the hairbrush, and She was the hairbrush he tossed onto the fire, and She was the fire he carried each day in his pipe. She was the pipe the bath water rode to the river,…
That it was fine linen flawlessly stitched, as silken as new skin. That it was the color of ivory or an old book’s pages left blank in the front. In the beginning shape of the letter A, it made a long A sound. With lace. Because she was heard to say it…
The dome, the mustache like a circus strongman’s, those shoulders people still climb on. and eyes that hold you in the snow before stacked and battered volumes of mutually exclusive systems of belief: UFOs, black magic, Madame Blavatsky’s wisdom received at the feet of lamas, while yours grow cold in the slushy street. His look…
So many have died, to pick just one seems willful, unkind, and besides you might forget the friend you promised never to forget, so let this be for anyone who died in this season of death, which from now on will be full of faces coming forward, smiling from the page like the line hastily…
Pin the ozone layer on me: I drove my Hummer into the sky when I gunned through a red light. I hit outer space; I clearly went too far. It’s hard to tweeze apart a hole from the everyday emptiness of air. Hard to touch upon a hole & not sail right through. One day…
No products in the cart.