The suitcase, deathly still by the door, sun-warm, waiting in the dusk-darkened corner. The cars coming and going there. Summer an endless usher of drugged voices, thunder, cold nights in the fan's path, water thin over the face, the dresser's black square. Then, quick as odor— rain on a jacket, steps in the foyer. In…
1. VIRGINIA BEACH Late air sweet and jagged with mosquitoes, ocean extending its deep hands along the shoreline. Bride's lace of surf, lace of mourning crossing its long wrists— Perhaps death is fine, as life is fine, and comes in beautifully from the horizon. This is where Edgar Cayce came to peel the world back—…
I knew I'd end up facing his psychiatrist, telling him of my bedtime review of everything I'd eaten that day, my skill at silently forcing up anything that would keep me from feeling bone. I also knew that doctor would be followed by another who would ask me questions. I was twenty-five and good at…
When the woman watches her husband sink into that dark, lakelike nothingness of disease driving him to forget everything but the faucet's cool stream, where again he wrings his hands, her slender arms assume this rounded shape, curved in the malleable shadow of themselves, waiting. Or tucked in stoic repose the pelicans finally at day's…
I had to crawl to get in Between the stove and the wall, But once there I fit easily. In that corner, the stove was All there was: its tiles warm And plain; a quiet plume Of dust. While all the rest, Even the man in the hat Hand in hand with his wife On…
You can take it back now, not as in beginning in medias res, but as in your desire for a plot— because if what you want to know is that on January 17 of some new year Toyotas went on sale in Sacramento, where there was a subplot involving the San Francisco dealer, and I…
We have traveled a long way riding the chilly island ferry. If a piano were playing it would not be the music of Handel. The gull floating behind the ship is a perfect syllable dying to be born, a piece of ash freed from the ship's stack. We raise our arms with saltines until he…
Years later, when a voyager sends back Your picture, the letters and the map, I feel as if I'd travelled there myself. You've come down to greet me On your private shore, to tell me All that's happened—how, in secret, Your island has become a wonder. Its sheer escarpments fill the glass— Its vast features…
My friend wears boots to sleep so that I might learn her path. I know the way now. The room is as silent as a child in a closet. I hang this notion from an instrument of hindsight where it rocks at the appropriate moment like fortune's cube on a string. My neighbor with no…
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