“What’s for you won’t go by you,” he told me, the great, recalcitrant songwriter so heavy-browed with doubt and kindness. I was eighteen and had taken a Greyhound from New York to Nashville to find him, my corduroys indistinguishable from my self. That whole wolf-on-skates year his music had saved me, made me feel something…
I found a boat tied up at the water’s edge, rocking, rope frayed, oars banging in their locks. At home, you never knew what might happen. A surprise a minute, they say. In the distance dark clouds, no trace of the other shore. It might have been wise to have brought a compass and life…
We’d only just begun to scratch the floors with our own furniture, unfold the box flaps and hang the walls to look like our walls in the old apartment: familiar faces, fruits. Then we heard it, the long scrapes in deep grooves overhead. It came from the devil’s peak, after we’d turned the bedroom into the…
We think we can find the beginning, the origin, the genesis. We look everywhere, the nativity is nowhere, Jesus is absent. The land is lost, it doesn’t speak these languages. The sea keeps its own history. We keep our own images of our bible, our Terra Santa. When you came you found what’s modern, what’s…
The oracles say the quiet part out loud. A wife is a machine of someone else’s dreams. To survive, you must drown a heart that wants to float, muscle atrophying in salt. Make an artifact out of your pain, a tribute to the girl you used to be. Ignore the hot pinch in your chest…
I figured if I studied enough, life would make sense so I skipped the games and the girls, ate lunch in a hurry and spent the afternoons in the library. On Saturday nights when everyone was out gunning their engines, I camped alone at the beach listening to the lap of waves and the chittering…
1. They sleep on their shadows, long for no one, their speech drifts weightless through their lanes. Gold thread, fistfuls of barley, a jar of Aristaeus’s gold, an old woman’s needle, her pearly lace lining the harbor road. Taxis for Darnis awaiting passengers, Sudanese farmhands milling about, and into the bay, the sponge pickers go…
Was it madness that enabled you to fall into the ocean— if you were “dancing” on the rocks as I’ve been told, it could have been loss of balance—we say that of the mad don’t we, I can see each taunting lift of foot, the bitten hands flailing, I can, off East Haven more than…
Just there, deep in shadow, the peeling paint of an old door to a carriage house behind untrimmed cypress branches, a shade somewhere between turquoise and navy wrung by rain to namelessness, a color we can no longer locate on the spectrum, the lost blue of tenderness and sorrow overlain with exaltation, a door we…
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