Swallows, phoebes, flycatchers, chickadees, warblers, and some terns and sparrows are less than an ounce, and are so little of water, more hollow than bone, though of substance in boughs and leaves, where they perch and fly, for how little they want of what matters, bright and unmistakable—aspiring, disappearing—not of who they are but of…
Stoned in the canned jangle of steel drum tunes in the faux Tiki bar, I sit below dusty plastic fronds and nurse my drink. A few stools down, too precious for words, a tongue-studded, nose-ringed, lesbian couple, heads bowed close, whisper secrets and softly laugh. I want their love to last. I order a plate…
I’d read the book before but when the building blew up I found myself drawn in again. I knew the wife would yell, “Oh,” as her husband fell. There would be the blackness of the night and the way the world becomes a gray swirl before our eyes. I picked up a section of orange…
She is unnaturally educated. Can take a word, crosshair it into place and begin its trajectory toward l’ancien. Greek, Latin, hieroglyphics. Whatness is concerned with content. So many private horrors stink of kerosene, bloodsport. Whereness is concerned with linkages. We begin almost demented by the Big Bang accuracy of metaphor. And the Word was ….
She tells me, “It smells like your mother” as we enter room 53 (twin beds, bath, 95 euros) of the Hôtel Jeanne d’Arc in Paris, and it’s true, there’s a heavy though not displeasing scent of lilac face powder of the kind used by old Southern ladies of a certain generation….
If description could outpace effusions of feeling, serif or sans serif, punctuated with dashes and in Amherst, could one say it was a peculiar summer. I tried to like what I’d always liked and tried to get there sooner rather than later. I’d forgotten I liked orange until on a scale of one to ten…
His music, Charles writes, makes us avoidable. I write: emissary of evening. We’re writing poems about last night’s bat. Charles has stripped the scene to lyric, while I’m filling in the tale: how, when we emerged from the inn, an unassuming place in the countryside near Hoarwithy, not far from the River Wye, two twilight…
No waste of shame, no wilting of the flower, the stick shall not break, the bat shall not splinter, no friend will wake, no end of winter; nor remembrance of splendor to counter the paper bull’s power will cover the lake with ice when gamblers spill the dice: the mirror shall not tilt, the quick…
a man sitting across from me in a French restaurant in New York City a name is a word is the first form of domestication an explanation of the secret language he spoke with his father in the marketplace in la Villette: lincsé for five francs, larante for forty and the word for money, le…
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