My life ago, in this renascent slum shabby Jews in sweatshops, with irregular papers, wherever they came from, gathered mid-morning around a samovar enthroned amidst rows of Singer sewing machines. They trusted the Republic. They were last seen being beaten with rifle butts onto sealed trains. Their great-nephews are Orthodox extremists; their great-nieces are hash-smoking…
Inside ourselves, inside ourselves so long we are engravened there. Inside the hot streets mazing from the Suq to fractious cul-de-sacs, piss smell & whitewashed alleyways, mules & taxi radios throbbing Rai & still inside ourselves. (Still with our own canopic jar— pulsing from its negative …
from “The Changing Face of AIDS” The day he came to give his estimate, the rap he played came echoing amidst the tall Victorians that line our street— a jarring rumble, even in the cave that they create. He wore a rumpled shirt emblazoned with his name. “I’m Rafael— it’s nice to meet you, Dex.”…
Cy Twombley, set of five paintings, 1985 Here it is, the Impressionist garden raised to another level of fluidity, no shape assembling itself in a wash of pink and red, a watery garden where one color flows into another, roses blazing and bleeding, pink, crimson, carmine, scarlet, until the color flames to blood, the colours…
Two months after she died, Billy asked: How’s Lynda doing? Billy, I said, she died, remember? Under the weight of supper’s constellation, the table wavered. Manic, he’d cook and then he’d insist on cleaning up: it calms me. Just now remembering, I remember, embarrassed, he’s dead, too. What’s the distance between a source and its…
November 1997 Its bare branches the winter before were exuberant scrawls against a blank sky about to snow and then snowing, or runes punctuated by the brownish-gray question marks of squirrels. And this fall, the leaves were so gold they looked heavy as Cleopatra’s burnished throne or as some feeling unexpressed. The one tree in…
Overcast till 4 p.m. Gunshot-like crackling punctuates the hazy afternoon— premature fireworks as neighborhood kids prepare earsplitting festivities in honor of Independence Day. Bees big as doorknobs buzz drunkenly by, barely able to remain airborne. The dog races ahead through Elysian Park. We’re on a dirt trail that winds through California scrub—scorched hillsides of orange…
As if their very comeliness were centrifugal, one falls forward slightly toward the husband and wife standing together under the outdoor lights of a summer party. Sunburnt, vibrant, expressive, perfectly proportioned, they make clear, unwittingly and in relief, our ordinary, passably-attractive selves. God and goddess, or king and queen, amassing mythic energy as they speak…
Number 280 in the Audubon Society Field Guide At first it seems the most subtle of spirits, inhabiting invisibly this dense, adumbral light at the bottom of the woodland understory, the rise and fall of its own recurring phrase so tremulous, so mournful a tone, we resist our impulse to pause beneath…
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