A wild early April strangeness, crazier than any autumn evening, mild air full of flooding wind, motions of storming branches, a queer, creaky, crying sound way off, as the rain advances— What’s that?—thud of thunder? a big tree going down? the sound of the untime after? No, only the hour of the changes, swift, oceanic,…
Far away from this house, far from Concord, grew orchards where willowy women read scrolls, not stiff-backed books, picked pomegranates, not apples. There, as in fairy tales, houses glittered like gilt-edged books, princes and princesses walked in concord under the sun’s golden apple. But women had to be practical in this house, while the transcendentalist…
The duende got into my head by the back staircase, a gypsy girl-child dressed in red with an old man’s face. My bedroom turned bitter cold. There were banging noises, loud knockings in between the walls. Things left their places. My comb crawled across the bureau, clicking like castanets. My grandmother’s ivory-backed mirror cracked itself…
I’m a cipher. Before that, I was a loose cannon. Before that, I was a zealot. I preached on the street corners. I accosted strangers in subways to tell them I had good news for them. Before that, I worked on the assembly line in a fireworks factory. I stuck fuses in firecrackers and poured…
I have had just about all I can take of myself. —S. N. Behrman There’s a rose bush outside, like the one by the kitchen where Serena some evenings uncovered a pasta dish, beyond exquisite. My new wife and I would inhale its perfumes and sigh. Not like Adamo, her husband, who’d barely touch it….
Translated from the Yiddish by Maia Evrona Like women who are loved to the fullest and are still unsatisfied, and go through life with laughter and with rage in their eyes of fire and agate— so were the years. And they also appeared to be as actors, hesitantly performing Hamlet before the market; as…
1. A finger is cut from a rubber glove And clamped as a tourniquet around my toe. The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed. The shots supposed to have pricked and burned The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice. The toe, as I watch, slowly turns a bluish Gray, the color of flesh on…
Through the skein of years, I had nothing to fear from this place. How final and brief it would be to disappear from this place. The tangle of driftwood and Coke cans and kelp in the sand made me think of the muddle that drove us (my dear) from this place. An orchard, a vineyard,…
That dog never barked, not a whimper, so it was heaven living next door to Pickwick and his mistress, Elzbieta, the Polish novelist on Brattle Street, my first apartment, my first year out of grad school. Elzbieta escaped the Warsaw ghetto, then worked for the Resistance during the war. What had I accomplished at 24?…
No products in the cart.