There is a section in my library for death and another for Irish history, a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan, and in the center a row of imperturbable reference books, the ones you can turn to anytime, when the night is going wrong or when the day is full of empty…
1. Today I walk, find countless calla lilies. How anything grows its own perfect white and stays that way—unafraid of world. It is lovely, so I look. It doesn’t matter what it thinks of me. 2. This is what I’ve been given to look at. I never chose to be here— California gardens, riches. There…
for Mary Sorry for the tardiness of my response. I’ve been lost in thought, unable to reach you. Your message arrived, brown, brain-sized nut, stripped to its rough shell, my name and address singed on. I want you to know I read it carefully, held it to my ear and listened to the mystery that…
He showed me brochures for the last moment of my life. He had done an elaborate makeup job on his wrists, so it would look as if he had tried to commit suicide. He gave me a ring, bright as the eyes of a child on a stupid church trip. Our families threw advice at…
I knew a force lay hidden in the air that could raise this heat from only a spark, lick the sky and still be hungry. I lit a page of rolled up news and ran out back with arm upraised and stuck it under. It didn’t catch at first. I threw a cup of diesel…
In Chekhov, everyone’s unhappy— this one loves that one who loves someone else. The doctor, a fixture of the plays, is always old as Chekhov, who died young, must have felt himself to be. And the aging writer, who also resembles Chekhov, chases a girl he will abandon soon and is stuck with the habit…
You came down to me in the hollow after work. I was reaping my just desert of overcommitting myself this March to too many taps. I was resting for a while on a stump, listening to the steady drip of sap in the pails. You were dressed in a skirt and purple blouse,…
Clock a few miles east on Jericho Turnpike— how new asphalt levels the ride. Consider too the foot-thick concrete slabs (poured in the ’30’s or earlier) we used to drive on, the road beneath the road. Before that, plank: two parallel rows of hemlock, four inches square—sleepers, laid in three to four feet apart, upon…
Heart feels sad. He’s tired of being a heart and wants to be a lung. A lung never lacks a sister or brother. He wants to be a finger. A finger always has a family. Or a spleen which only feels anger and is never sad. Sometimes Heart feels joyous, beats with vigor. But then…
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