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…
You and I lay together on a grassy bed while one sparrow chased another from a limb. A bumblebee left a flower he seduced, and flew away covered in her scent. I reached my lips to catch your lips before they turned away. “Just a kiss, please a kiss.” “It always starts the same way,…
One summer he planted a tree it was young, just a few branches no bigger than a rosebush. We were intent on watching it we were young we wanted the fruit to come. Father brought the coffee can outside paced between the tree and the backyard spigot. We liked to watch him fill the can…
When she came into his room he was asleep and when she touched him, he woke— her hand on his shoulder, her knee at his mouth, and in the darkness, she looked like a boy. When he tried to sit up she covered his ears with her hands: “Save ourselves from ourselves,” she said, and…
A vial of it: dusty, warm From being held so long In my hand; the little cork that fit So well, the cap I would undo In secret, sprawling on the floor Of the basement, recalling a scene From Kafka, or glancing in horror At the old vermilion volume On Chinese torture, or savoring The…
1. The Sandbox We celebrated a funeral for a dead ladybug and smoothed the surface with the belly of a spoon. Who would count the tiny dots now, or study the long crawl and sudden flight? We dug a pit for a hemlock leaf curled into itself. We said last rites for a fleck of…
That which you made me do I did. That which you made me say I said. Now the blame, like oil over water, spreads, and so our life together that began in vows—the licensed oath— has leased itself back to us both: what we knew and couldn’t know what our words no longer show.
Winter 1991-92 - Digital