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…
1959 When we set out on the train to Agra I thought, What an old palace we are going to see, it’s an old grave. I was tired when we reached the station and you hired a taxi to take us to the steps of the Taj Mahal; you couldn’t even wait until morning,…
Thank God for the beaver pond. You know I had my doubts about cutting the two-hour trail so close to the pond, but those animals are not shy, and let me tell you: it was destiny. Those two men I guided last night? They said they had come all the way…
One of those pizza-like images of the moons of Jupiter before computer enhancement is how I look to this moth, since that’s how everything looks (see Monet, etcetera) before the brain, with help from personal history, cleans it up. And this moth, the poor trustee of one small fraction of a thought, has got no…
We saw it on the side of the road, its back legs splayed like scissors that have come unhinged: a rabbit dragging its ruined parts, insisting on the sweet grass beyond the curb. We knew it was dying, Susan and I. We said We should leave it, as we stopped down the road and asked…
Fatherhood is like dying. A flood of days pools at the neck. Glub. He was born on the th of June. In the movie version, ghostly Jennifer Jason Leigh sits at the bus station, strung out, penniless, blowing cigarette smoke at the bruises on her distant, fetal legs, and dreaming of an Academy Award. Careful…
Colors get married and dance steps try but a dance step is selfish. Diagrams make dioxin look like a six-sided dance with carbon prongs but dance steps won’t build up over time. Some of the white leaks out, a strangeness we can’t recognize till marshes resemble these rheumy stanzas but unchosen. Dioxin likes breast…
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