Althea kept a list of the things she could live without—perfumed soaps, clean rugs, cats. It was a long list. She added to it from scraps she wrote on when she thought of them. Every fortnight or so she gathered up the scraps and in her ancient and exquisite longhand added them to her…
No one owes us anything. We claim it’s mother and father. How can you live in this place? The floors are so dirty and it stinks. I sit waiting for the mailman. There’s a package he’s bringing. Why isn’t he here yet? The worm is alive. The apple tree, the coyote, the walnut, the beggar,…
—Plato, Republic The cold call of the cold to the cold Follows itself to the moon, To the edge of the storm, to the fold in the fold In the shrouds of the fallen-too-soon. The call of the cold to the never-held, The sung-over, the one-by-one Follows the moon to the world where the world…
The autumn aster, those lavender ones, and the dark-blooming sedum are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth with the remote intensity of a dream. These things take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see, everything I can think of. I want ordinary…
—Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour A chair, A nuthatch on the trunk of a walnut tree, The bloated belly of a dead deer, A man of seventy Grunting at toenails he struggles to pare. A woman In a straw hat over straw-textured hair Kneeling in a garden. What is not now departure will be. Foam on…
A punt, a water keg and some bottles washed up on the beach at Viareggio. Eight days passed before they found the body. The face and hands were fleshless, and everybody knows Keats’s poems were in his breast pocket, though what pierces me the most is how the book was doubled back as if the…
—Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society The man with the crooked dick strikes a match. The woman with one arm breaks into flame. The man finds a bird’s skull and wants to play catch. The woman hears the skull calling her name. He looks out the window. She looks in the door. He crushes…
On July 14, 1954, Frida Kahlo, who had swallowed the world whole, sat up in the crematorium cart and spit it out, her hair blazing like an aureole, her face smiling in the center of a sunflower before she disintegrated along with her seeds. The phenomenon of heat causing a body to rise has been…
Not far from San Diego steel ship containers packed with jeeps sit unopened and someone I know very well stands on the boulevard, surrounded by the pink and white stucco walls outside my window suspended in this moment between breathing out and breathing in the men and women at Camp Pendleton relax their arms…
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