As for the fly I chased around the bathroom with a towel that night, swatting, slapping, thrashing, pounding, kicking with one foot the toothbrush cup onto its side, dislodging the tea curtain with a misplaced elbow, unable for all my efforts to terminate his gallant loops and arabesques, his beeline dives and fighter-pilot vectorings, his…
Pit yourself against gutted ships, against the lips of those you love the least, against the hollows where quails spend their lives. Do not sleep. Do not take shape. Ambush the soft armies of seas and the singular face of an adjacent cliff. Scream the way everything screams. Find a small longitude to stitch along…
Better a monosyllabic life than a ragged and muttered one; let its report be short and round like a rifle, so that it may hear its own echo in the surrounding silence. —Thoreau A life: pared to the bone. Think of a room with no chair,…
It’s the day after Christmas a flat gray morning where the rain has fallen on the crooked streets and no one has stolen our newspaper, its headline denouncing the young Nigerian, someone’s devout beloved son who tried to blow up a plane, my own son half asleep on the couch in his Levis and unraveled…
Not the rising sun, but the setting sun. Not the father, but the mother. Not the cross, but the circle, drawn in ink, not blood. The Word inhabited but unspoken, like a bell unrung. A cathedral of the mind, gray and cool as Time, with doors so tall and heavy that I must tug and…
The night is tall and strewn with rocks cutting my feet as I climb, panting under the blankets, the quilt. Will it ever be light again? I hear sounds outside, footsteps that I hope are a deer’s cloven hooves. Coywolves in the marsh shriek like banshees over a kill. What, I think, is a banshee,…
At first you were famously not good at it. You were coaxed, given cocoa, lectured a bit. On the morning of a journey they would gather you up And bundle you into the station wagon, asleep Or pretending sleep, among pillows and soft voices, While the car made its turnings through darkened places. Later you…
We live alone together except for five cats, yet sometimes the only way to be truly alone is to run away together. Away from the computer, e-mail, Facebook, the cell phone, the land line, meetings, the endless list of things to be done— that no matter how many I cross off, keeps growing so that…
Homo Fictus…is never conceived as a creature a third of whose time is spent in the darkness. —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel Strange, how rarely it’s a topic. Yet how we cherish that dark, soothing lake water beneath our chattery reflexive surfaces. “Already,” a story has it, “she seemed to be fishing in…
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