I talk the least of what I covet most, seldom look at what I wish to see, turn my nose away from what smells best, refuse to listen to my favorite opera, La Traviata, even when it’s sung in town for free. The Van Gogh show can’t make me walk the block to view it,…
off-season home of a circus elephant Here, the past forgets its boundaries, shines through abandoned objects: the caved tin roof of the slave quarters, wind-beaten planks and rusted knives scattered in dust and sand. Soon, the elephant will make her slow way down this path, graze among the ruins and pines; each step an…
Imagine that all you can do is glitter and you are only one small star in an expanse as wide as infinity is, and surrounded by a darkness filled up with other glitterings, fire and rock making flame into a voice. And these other small voices are all you hear in the void, their cries…
Only the colorless eye is undistracted: a lake Rubbed blue by twilight is not blue to the eye cast blue And a violet sunset cannot be refracted Violet through the violet eye. A crimson retina Won’t conceive the paint of a rigging blooded by dusk Or the stain a star makes, cutting its patina Crimson…
We raked until raking puffed our mitts with hot blisters. Then we desisted. Wind de-raked our raking then, spilled the tops of our piles, blew new-fallen bronzes across brief spans of lawn. We worked like the damned: I the Sisyphus of fall, you the Sisyphus of autumn. Rakes dropped, we drifted through discarded wrappers to…
As I walked onto the ward a soldier’s voice rose up tender out of the dusk— I thought you were my sister. You have those Irish features. He was American, a medic during Tet, whose spirit returned now in spurts like flames from a clogged gas jet. Death tanks down the door and your mind…
It’s September: I’ve moved into town, into the attic of an old barn—a big open room I reach by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor. The room is long and high, with windows at each end, a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake and chatter in the northeast…
You’re a nurse now and this ward ain’t the schoolbook, so you sedate him, paraldehyde, 5 ccs each hip, and don’t expose it to air, it’ll turn to vinegar, it’ll eat plastic and it reeks, use a glass syringe and DON’T DROP IT. Junkies howl and sweat and beg but they won’t seize and code…
“Name the eight states that begin with the letter M,” Mohammed, my driving teacher, says. I’m forty-one. Am I in school? I glance at the rearview mirror, glad I can’t see my embarrassing STUDENT DRIVER bumper sticker. I spread a ghost-map across the windshield, quickly scroll down the East Coast, top to bottom. “Maine. Massachusetts….
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