When Bodhidharma came from the West, for nine years he sat, face-to-wall. A student asked old Yang-chi, “What could this possibly mean?” “He was Indian,” Yang-chi replied with a grin, “he spoke no Chinese.” Chuang Tzu says, “If you follow dictates of an accomplished heart, then you have found a teacher. And who can fail…
There’s a body inside the body. It’s the form that rises up, immune to fire. It’s the kingdom of nothing as a body. High nothing! You see its shell in the mirror, draw back. Feel ashamed. It wakes in a dream and speaks in silence. Suffers names. What do you call it? The one as…
He was the yard dog’s yard dog. His heads accessorized with snakes. His tail a scorpion’s, and his slaver, a seed bank for Hell’s herbarium. And his bites were worse than his barks. What did he do in the underworld except to guard the stairs leading away from the bitter tide lap of the Styx?…
for Leslie and Kitty Norris He has no choice: he must leave England and travel, not to Rome, a mistake in his case, but to Colorado where the mountain air and winter sun will clear his lungs. He’ll pack a twig from the plum tree and some gravel from the garden walk. He’ll sing to…
SIDE A— the face handled careful, black wax grooves going round in an endless endless grin— King Louis Armstrong blowing like no tomorrow. Oooh hoo I wanna be like you-who— Pops wipes his brow with a kerchief as if cleaning a needle, a skipping dusty LP. An ape like me would love to be human…
When the fin of faithlessness appeared I watched it circle, dip, and veer then ride the swells. Where I stood, on shore among the surf-casters’ gear, RVs and 4 x 4’s, I tried to guess where it would rise, sleek bottlenose breaking next, so I might measure the erratic progress that it made beyond the…
On two occasions in the past twelve months I have failed, when someone at a party spoke of him with a dismissive scorn, to stand up for D. H. Lawrence, a man who burned like an acetylene torch from one end to the other of his life. These individuals, whose relationship to literature is approximately…
There’s one good book in everyone, or so the saying goes, at least one, and I like to think of Miss Shaughnessy, my third-grade teacher, hair bunched back in a crimped bun, dress as drab as those gray afternoons spent dreaming in her class, eyes two magnified minnows behind glass thick as astronomical lenses—could she…
He hollowed out the book, a window in each page, until he made a safe to hold the things that when he touched them made him tremble: a stolen turquoise ring, a condom sealed in foil, a quarter lid of pot. His house was safe and warm, the rooms were bright occasions and yet his…
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