One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight— but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray while a single…
Sometimes, now, I think of the back of his head as a physiognomy, blunt, rich with facial hair, the elegant stone-wall shapes of the skull like sensing features, as hard to read as surfaces of the earth. He was mysterious to me in his anterior depths, occiput, lambdoid, but known like a loved home outcrop…
My name in the black air, called out in the early morning. A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning. Our partings were rehearsals for the final scene: you and I in a desert, saying goodbye on a white September morning. The call came. West, I flew west again. Impossible, but the sun…
And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? —Yeats Let’s not pretend we could be less complicated than millions before us. Let’s be just friends, be Platonic, only look at the bottoms of each other’s feet, or skin on inner forearms, where the sun has done almost no…
Nights turn a hairpin curve to dreams: I need to find our child a country or a name. I forget which. Jung remembered the smell of milk from his high chair, Woolf, red and purple flowers sprawled on her mother’s dress. A nun’s pink nose swoops towards me like a bird in my first recall….
1. That the wandering would be the more-favored part, this was unexpected, exceptional. Even the gnaw of the harness, faces shawled against the dust, nights without fire—sweet to him now— even this. Who could find that point again, at the canvas steppes where exhaustion forced them on into the serrated mouths of grass rather than…
Annoyed with the parochialism of the “fantastic city” of St. Petersburg and close to the unexpected end of his life, Gogol escaped to Rome. He settled in a colony of Russian artists, shared lodgings with his bosom friend, the painter Alexander Ge. On their long walks they discovered “the inner meaning of everything.” Gogol, a…
Two Italians painted on both sides of the grand marble staircase in the Scuola di San Rocco—The Plague. The great equalizer. In this democracy of the dead, a woman and her baby are flung over a pallet on wheels, a man with sinews and massive calves pushes them, and it could be almost tender how…
In the apartment next door, a boy plays the piano, Chopin, mostly, though sometimes notes he’s made up. Through the woman’s window climbs the noise of 14th Street: merciless horns, squealing bus brakes, carnival-like music from an ice cream truck belting “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” over and over and over. The phone rings:…
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