You wander into my thought, my happiness, the way the deer wander through the yard these days, very relaxed, with no thought of being hunted, browsing the bushes near the driveway like people at the refreshment table of an art opening… That’s how you come over me— not with a burst of wings, but with…
What am I doing, trudging around Natick, Massachusetts, so archetypal in its split-level, clapboard ordinariness, one house after another like a crowd gathered haphazardly at an accident site? And why explore the deafening blandness of the little streets with fenced-in yards, where day after day—iPod loaded with arias— Ti prego, rubami il cuore!—I wheel the…
You have been away too long. For pleasure. On business. You are coming home and the almanac predicts heat waves, hurricanes, other unlikelihoods. The old bar in our town is serving seven cocktails for the price of six. The deck is open. Pleasure. You are coming home with your pregnant girlfriend whom no one has…
Growing up, there were always two laws. My mother, the greater, the greatest Who made enemies if necessary out Of the trashman or the paperboy. Queen without her court and details, Commands so precise, you could not Follow if you were not one of her students; If you did not know her nobility you might…
When the sun broke up the thunderheads, and dissonance was consigned to its proper place, the world was at once foreign and known to me, that was shame leaving the body. I had lived my life from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Wet and glistening, twisting…
In the church, midweek at noon, there is a middle distance between the piercing blue window of pure belief and the bone vault housing my heart’s disbelief, a dim yielding distance related to my prayer: another day’s delay before you are nowhere— for death fixes all distances like a new nail.
Thirty-six years till my mother is born The perfumes she wore when she was young whatever happened The bottom of her jewelry drawer calls and calls as I run her through her first school play She doesn’t understand Stroke my stomach mother till I understand Why is the movie too advanced? Why do we have…
Sometimes at dusk when the earth gives its sweet breath to the trees, I think how I have taken a stranger’s life and whispered not so much as his name to the asphalt sky. How each year, on my mother’s birthday, I hear the warbled rasp of his breathing and it pushes and draws me…
The buzz of electricity circles a yellow bulb in Maine’s humid heat. June bugs bomb the porch light with spiny legs—date-colored and oversize. Spring peepers pin the night, pitch a universe in my mother’s kitchen, except I have not yet…
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