January, moth month, crisp frost-flank and fluttering, Verona, Piazza Bra in the cut-light, late afternoon, midwinter, 1959, Roman arena in close-up tonsured and monk robed After the snowfall. Behind my back, down via Mazzini, the bookstore And long wooden table in whose drawer Harold will show me, in a month or so, …
After I got married and became the stepfather of two children, just before we had two more, I bought it, the bright blue sorrowful car that slowly turned to scratches and the flat black spots of gum in the seats and stains impossible to remove from the floor mats. Never again, I said as our…
No woman knows the power she holds at fifteen until it’s gone. Long, loose S of the lower back. Inchoate cheekbone, bracelet of wrist. Soap-soft, uncertain fingertip. Dumb curve of the bottom lip, stunned to mute by its own prettiness. I wore a shell-pink dress with a boat neck collar, my long hair back and…
After all these analyses, the fact remains intact.
Any afternoon on the brink of extinction there they were: lolling in the canopy, loud-mouthed with abandon, red-cheeked, eating the topmost leaves. Where the monkey prospered, the Ghana forest now slumps into stillness, the way a dying man suddenly sees something in the distance and gives it his complete and stony attention. I can’t ponder…
I asked Johan why he left home and came to America. How sad it can be in winter listening to the wind . . . No wonder that in the dawn in the mist, one by one figures appear among the trees, making their way to the sea. This is the day when the pack-boat…
There’s joy for the well-turned shinbone, praise for the wrought torso, we were warned when he opened those gray eyes. What gifts we gave we gave for virtues—a white stone castle to teach him courage, small guns to set the blood. A storybook, illuminated, kept him close, hard against the fire. He…
This was more like it, looking up to find a burlapped fawn halfway across the iced-over canal, an Irish navvy who’d stood there for an age with his long-tailed shovel or broad griffawn, whichever foot he dug with showing the bandage that saved some wear and tear, though not so much that there …
I read somewhere that in Kentucky they had to pass a law forbidding a man from marrying his grandmother. It’s the damnedest thing, but I don’t doubt it. I have a cousin there who lives in farm country where the most handsome man is the mortician. Every night Becky prays for a beautiful death so…
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