Lo! with a little rod, I did but touch the honey of romance— And must I lose a soul’s inheritance? —Oscar Wilde Yes, until proved otherwise: innocent, innocent . . . Not a lover, more a connoisseur of slender works of art. The form of a cat or cat-o’-nine-tails. Or of a long-necked porcelain vase,…
They lived in town, in houses that touched, houses that needed paint, and money for the rent. We never talked of their parents. We didn’t know their families, what they did on Sundays. They were the boys our mothers feared, alien boys, and we the moths drawn to their light. They were the boys who…
They are not lilacs, though their thousand blue torches rise up everywhere on our boulevard and ignite Spring. I have eyes. I know what I see. A symbol of something like love, conflated with that delicate bruise color. Desert blue, arroyo blue, pool shimmer, blue of the jay’s wing gliding south above the aircraft plants….
“Lie down beside me,” I whispered. So we lay on the bed in that room that was the whole world to us. Outside, the innkeeper’s children kicked a soccer ball along the quay. Seagulls flocked and dispersed, and the busy foolish world went about its foolish business. I shut my eyes and we met on…
1. Over and over, I think we have come to a place like this, dead sound stopping the soul in its eager conversations Or, a classical theme repeated over and over interrupted by a voice disguised as human: Please stay on the line Your call is very important to us 2. Don’t know if I…
Two weeks after her husband’s death, just before I left for the airport, my mother said, But how will I get to the lawyer’s on time tomorrow? I said Well you’ll leave the house in plenty of time, she said No no, how will I wake up in time? You’ll set the alarm, Mom, and…
This morning, I turned down Mozart to listen to a mockingbird perched on a wire outside my window. Poor Mozart. Dead, he was much the worse for comparison. But as soon as I lowered the music, the mockingbird flew. He had been listening to Mozart.
When my mother turned sixty, she kissed the invisible stars on the foreheads of her two grown men and deemed them worthy stars The sky, a vaulted blue dome, empties itself and fills Pyongyang with quick, fluid stars Tonight, longing fans out like a silk curtain over an empty room; a girl’s eyes burn…
When I am the lone listener to the antiphony of crickets and the two wild tribes of cicadas and let my mind wander to its bogs, its sloughs where no endorphins fire, I will think on occasion how all memory is longing for the lost energies of innocence, and then one night— whiskey and the…
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