Poetry

The Shy

We even breathed shyly, all the while envying everybody their courage & finesse. But either our nerve gave out, or we were much too patient, always over-rehearsed, like those old men, the frowners who spend hours fly casting in the park, practicing, each flick of their wrists erasing the memory of streams and flame-spotted trout….

Real Life #2: Scraps

    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…

Who Owes Us

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,…

Glory

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…

The Death of Shelley

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…

Rising Bodies

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…