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The house is a sort of airy structure that moves about on the breath of time. —G. Bachelard The greying bard of Camden sits where two walls meet, afraid of light and sound as it comes in the window: the hearty noise of children playing and women calling out to their mates as they trudge…
There are certain lies I need to tell you. I hope that they are successful. Not that the lies are successful, but what I am saying behind the lies will be. There are certain things I want you to know about me. Not that I am good and kind, I am those things and I…
On the J train, a gun swung toward the wide-eyed messenger with a crippled hand, the gunman a burly man with sunglasses tells witnesses “Be cool,” the bullet shattering a window after ripping the heart apart. At the Canal Street station, slowly up the steps, head down, he's vanished into Chinatown. Rush hour. Chilled September…
1. After the Reformation had settled the loamy soil and the lettuce-green fields of dollars, the clouds drifted away, light fell on the grass blooming from the sunny snow, and a red barn stood out on a hill with scattered hemlocks and white pine and the shut gate of a picket fence. * * * From the…
And there was my mother, toward the end she wore only a man's pajama top and a diaper. And one morning I went to her, because it was my turn, and I leaned over her bed, which now had a rail, and I prayed, “Please, please don't let me hurt her.” And I started to…
How could I foresee what was ahead while looking back seven centuries, one rose in the crystal vase in the room where she stood before me, legs slightly apart, golden dusk all over us when she told me not to go on talking as if I were dreaming, arguing the Summa Theologica's proofs that God…
When you're in the mountains you feel the desert air. Waking to fog on a salt marsh you taste the empty boulevards of July. The earth shifts with you, one road hooks to another— a travesty of coins, shards of amphora, a trail of carnelian, things to palm at a riverbend. Words in the hand…
When you were a child, on hot, drowsy. tropical afternoons, in a secret hideout at school you peeled and sucked mamones, gnawing the sweet, fleshy pulp, remembering stories of how addicts of the fruit had been asphyxiated by mamón pits blocking their windpipes. So each mamón was an invitation to ecstasy and death (mazard berries…
“The Prime of Life” is one section of Scattering Carl, a book set at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts from late spring to mid- summer, 1978. The book has the form of a journal—prose notes and meditations, poems and poem fragments. It is a fictional journal, a made-up journal, a falsification and strenuous…
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