Praise scissors that clip split ends easily as ex- boyfriends. The one who died in college, the refugee who crossed a blood-soaked Nile, but never could get over you. Praise coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep into Ohioan corn, romances banished to backseats and barstools, and newlyweds two-stepping to the second line waving paper…
I flick a switch—out flashes the light bulb,like God snapping his fingers in my face:Wake up, Pumpkinhead. I’ve been running aroundhalf-naked, with the rest of America,wearing only a credit card and a cashmere scarf.Arf, arf. Yesterday, I went to Circuit City’sgoing-out-of-business sale to revel in the fall of capitalism,but all I saw were the sad…
Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in the swish of a swift moving blade that slit her dreams in halfand sent her father strollingacross the cane field like a land-bending river, turning a page she could…
Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was notspeaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burstbetween his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slapthe table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever see. I never…
At the airport the conveyor bears small yachts shaped like luggageinto the distance, and I am headed, when they let me pass through the X-ray arch, toward home. There is a distancesometimes greater than this between us, since you are in another state—gaseous, solid, liquid, light—and I admitI am often absent lately from whatever is…
for Linda Gregg Safe in the light along the bankBeing in believingNo name Only being On the bank radiant and blank Safe watching and seeing On the brink Of the light Blank No blame in being Waiting then breathing in being SeeingSinging Let my voice Let my voice ceaseBeing On the banks along that brink After the blaze of knowingThat…
By wings whose shapesare but half a heart? Feathers oiled with country clubs andgasps of delight? Not for thesethe sandhill craneshakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene,she is the gatekeeper of gibe, a cement-gray song edged and pocked in grassyfields, a frock of scarletover her eye, her own letterto time and her maker; a bow, a leap, all a…
(A small, and still isolated, incident inNew York shows what can happen if authenticauthority in social relations has broken downto the point where it cannot work any longereven in its derivative, purely functional form.A minor mishap in the subway system—thedoors on a train failed to operate—turnedinto a serious shutdown on the line lastingfour hours and involving more than fiftythousand passengers because when thetransit authorities asked the passengers toleave the defective train, they simply…
we are not asked to see, the ridged foldsof the black walnuts, fallen, come veinedas any mind split from its skull, leachingwhat little parades as peace. Rotand wet. My right instep, sneaker’sunderneath, crushes a once greener skingone brackish at the cap. Looking up,the branches meet in an arch you canwalk under, pass through. And downthe…
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