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Ulysses S. Grant was a handsome man—wow—I love how The men in those old uniforms cocked their hips the clothes Looked like they got dirty and Ulysses is leaning His hip to the right, kind of messy Kind of like those sexy cowboys with a hand on a rifle And a hip cocked in the…
We are all intruders here though we fool ourselves this late winter day, carving a place on the banks to anchor our heels. We stretch over the water, hoping to slip onto the wings of a Great Blue Heron but afraid to get caught in the trap of reeds, twisting in the…
There’s a preponderance of dog shit in Paris but no one says so, attracted to its other, finer qualities. If people were stepping in that much crap in Detroit you’d never hear the end of it. Motown my ass, they’d say, without so much as a backward glance at the Miracles, the Temptations. They might…
has become one knotted rope one breath of cabbage soup one foot on the cobblestone— a thousand banners—no—one flag flapping its red letters into a satin tatter because this is the century of slivers and scraps—beauty of the dustbin—the crowd knows that nothing good can follow from that other prettiness —the slick summer palaces of…
A man and a woman in bed at night breathe in, breathe out earthly pleasure, crunch of red clay beneath my shoes when I take the gravel path past the old dairy through the hillside pasture. Midwinter provides another meaning, by which I mean that other, more elusive, pleasure I know when I see, first,…
to address mystery without being mysterious, never expecting anyone to know, speaking only for yourself but not be self-centered, conducting yourself as if your work mattered, never naming what you love, believing in truth– as who doesn’t?–and not trying to say something, not contenting yourself with saying nothing, to bow down, to hate nothing and…
My aunt sat with a drink, the afternoon lit on the sill and half of her beautiful face when she spoke of her first death. It happened after a storm. Silver rays formed beams on the sea through the gray clouds and the surf pounded the sandy stretches of the Jersey shore. A rip current…
Women are right: There must be meaning; and the meaning will die. Men are wrong: They suppose there can be a deathless meaning; or else that there can be joy without meaning. Women know the double truth: There must be meaning; and the meaning will die.
“Soft trees against blue sky.” That is how Mrs. Abernathy described it before she died. “A small barn bent further than my arthritic spine. A white clapboard house, a wood burning stove and a sink you could fall into and land in China.” The autopsy report said pneumonia. It might have included the thousand little…
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