At the bend of the highway just past the beachside melon and papaya stands Past the gated entrance to the Kuilima Hotel on the point where Kubota once loved to fish, The canefields suddenly begin—a soft green ocean of tall grasses And waves of wind rolling through them all the way to the Ko‘olau, a…
I was worn out, lost, and sixteen in China at 6 p.m., everyone suddenly in a purchasing frenzy, when he stopped me with a smile that just turned me upside down: gold caps on one side, gaps on the other. I could tell he was more human than most people, or more kind. He was…
remembering Lem Norrell All those rhetorical contraptions of the metaphysicals prying us loose from the world! And those licentious exhortations to squeeze the day! Something about the Anglican burial brought those back, and with them your voice rousing those metaphors off the page. It’s not like I didn’t get a heads-up, right? But…
Every morning in the hour before you wake, when the sun squares off against the kitchen floor, and the cups from last night still wear necklaces of wine, stoles of milk, I hear waves in the walls. A tide swells from the corner behind the fridge: crest and crash, and that silty forgiveness of sand…
A hairy hand with mouth and eyes, I would say, and was that scuttling, that side-stepping jig, the furred upper legs bent at the joint in demi-plié, was it scurry or whisk, romance or menace, this tuft half-hid behind our garden shed door? Her dragline ensnarls like a gossamer kiss to my thinking, she’s thinking,…
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, The Art of Falconry 1. Of the oil gland . . . Of the down . . . Of the numbers and arrangement of feathers in the wing . . . I have seen on the plains of Apulia how the birds in earliest spring were weak and scarcely able to…
what it was without growing old a fever a checkup the cold front dragging a rake a plow Pain thinks of something biography a place a word clearing & threshing snow & leaves opening the hour without growing old what it was Pain thinks of something arthritis blindness colloquy of field & figure light what…
Porco cane! Another day breaks with a gunshot and a chorus of yelping bloodhounds after boar. I ache to join in, but stay quiet, loyal dog-pig that I am. Pig-dog. Purebred cur in a pen: Sono io. The hunt’s trained out of me. Bark and growl, the baser instincts, I renounced them long ago. My…
Drunk off his can and pissed at the ruse of another day, backache a bum rap and woodpile shrunk to kindling, the old man stood at the kitchen sink and stared out at his neighbor’s cow. What a filthy beast, he thought. What a stinking, cud-chewing, gas-spewing waste of a field. And then, because what…
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