It sounded like eternity—the sun’s interminable plucking, plucking, plucking at the water’s strings, their one continuous chord. It was torment to witness this devotion to an instrument, knowing he’d lost his touch, knowing the skills in the bone plectrum of his neck fell short of the sun’s flash and dazzle. But—no. That was illusion: the…
Sharper than the scythe, which, like the ladder and the boards I couldn’t lift, was long. And quicker, since it was smaller, and, swung in an arc, would sing. I was the age of Latin in school, mollis for mullein, the flannel of whose leaf girls would rouge their Quaker cheeks with, for whom vanity,…
I sat in a crowded place away from you at dinner and did not pray you’d come near: did not imagine the hall our private room; did not want to approach you with an air of feigned indifference, leaving my meal- time companions behind; did not conspire alone to lure you into talk, to feel…
Only God can make a tree “THIS GROVE LACKS AN ALTAR.” —So Latch built A temple and an altar. Templum aedificavit. How shall I remember the use of his tools? (A coffin-maker among the Immortals. What a scream!) —Where is that Latch now? Will I see him again in his shadowy cave On…
Everything rots but flowers leave memories. I was the boy who loved flowers, dried, fresh, not just their fragrance but their bee-stung bodies prayerfully folded into dusty skin. I was the boy who walked limp-limbed, scent-drunk, with the smell of spit on my hands, swearing: Relinquish me of my desire to be sunlit, beautiful. They…
Last night I walked in a field. The moon lit the snow: snow gray as the moon. And tried to remember your face—Luna Moth, circling the cold flame of the moon. At the same moment you looked up, protracting the old angle: self, secret-love, and the moon. The earth was young too. But what’s left…
In the chapel of the Catholic hospice we listened to the list of those who had died in the past six months. I waited to hear the name I had so missed hearing. A woman seated in back comforted a weeping man, her tears hidden, “I told you this would make you feel better. You…
I think I will become a selfish man. That’s what it will take to purge myself of my sick need to give. Strong is stubborn, many-limbed, but single-minded. Alone. I think I will be just like Eric was in boarding school. Early in the morning, when insomniacs sit awake, I would watch him running hard…
In your field of vision, there is a place where no image is fixed. It is a place where injury carved its cave of nothing, gathered blackness around a splinter’s wooden slip. One eye, you say, looks inward while the other scans the world. One eye examines the self’s invisible wanting. In that equation, I…
Summer 1980 - Digital