When I turned twelve and feared I’d go to hell, I used to write lists of my mortal sins on paper scraps I tucked into my wallet. Each time I broke one of the big commandments— not little ones, such as to honor parents which even Jesus, like me the son of peasants, had never…
translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi Oh how there in the glittering stretch that bends toward the hills the hum of evening lessens and the trees chat with the hackneyed murmur of the sand; and how this common life no more our own than our breath gets channeled there, crystalline, into orders of…
for Kyo-jin When Mrs. Im went back to Seoul to die it rained and I thought of her dying. It was March and cold there though it made no difference to her her hair no longer blue-black shoulder-length spirals of a young Mrs. Im the wife of Pastor Im’s brother but frizzy wire ends flattened…
All dressed up in the back of a taxi stopped at a traffic light on Central Park West one cocktail hour in December, I happened to spot a pair of shoes dangling in the air— brown, clownish workshoes dancing like marionettes from the thick strings of their knotted laces, which somebody (with a ladder?) had…
It was July and the peaches were green a man born in the year of the chicken with no knack for wealth or common knowledge lowered the box full of green peaches for a girl to see a girl at the front gate turning eight and waiting for a thing of wheels this is where…
The funicular, effortless as a toy, glides humming to a stop halfway uphill. Teeming with tourists, the steps break halfway again at a terrace where we pause to catch our breath, and half of Paris— though today, in the August haze, the view from Montmartre is just the odd tin…
With his two hands covering his two eyes he prays in the middle of the road over the clump of fur and bone that was himself. He looks like my old zayde in the synagogue two decades ago ashamed for his poverty. Comedian of the hard frost, deft…
At this distance, from the other shore, looking across the river north and east, you just can’t tell what kind of trees they are, feathered in those ideal humid greens in a sort of flow toward the horizon and the ocean. In perspective they diminish to depletion, into the sunset’s haw and haze, as if…
How Uncle Alvin tumbled from the hayloft, broke his neck. How once a one-armed hobo, a black man, split a half cord of stove wood for a plate of ham, green beans, and fried potatoes, which he ate, slowly, sitting on the grass in the shade of a doomed elm tree. Great-grandma stepped out on…
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