Four a.m. and the trees in their nocturnal turns seem free from our ideas of what trees should be like the moment in a dance you let your partner go and suddenly she's loose fire and unapproachable. Yesterday I saw L. again, by a case of kiwis and she seemed wrongly tall as if wearing…
I can still hear Robert Frost. He was the first. Who struggled up to the front, his white hair tossed across his eyes. The undergraduates grinned to hear a man snap twigs among the scholars. I remember Auden, too, in the great hall at Balliol, telling us he was sick. He had come home to…
It's not the chapel bell at Arles, only a doorbell rung on television, but it's enough to send the dog in a scurry and yapping to the front door where no one is. I'm not Gauguin, at least not now, the isle of Tahiti has disappeared into the ether of possibility, and the girls, too….
The high-silled window with no shade or sash. Let's start with that, with nothing but big square panes of clean glass, the clear glare of law and the weather, rain mixed with clouds, and wind. And beneath them on the landing, three girls, three teenaged girls, teaching themselves to smoke and to flick ash. And,…
Coming into the home stretch—but what’s home? A couple of years before he died, Ray got stung by a bee and his heart nearly stopped. Previous stings hadn’t bothered him. Now he became allergic to gluten, milk, fruit. He broke out at a look, had problems breathing. Women get menopause. Men pause, then fall. Another…
I have to sympathize with the child. The mother has changed clothes twice, nothing seems right tonight, nothing fits, not even the moon between those two trees, it's simply too big, too fat, too angry to stay put. The other woman has skinny legs and a face like rain. So I have to sympathize with…
I blow on the fire to help it find its wood. The corners of the room are askew. The files have knuckles hard as teak. They bang out sentences on the insides of lampshades, as if it were a party game. A skull sits on its occiput by the window, looking up among glass fused…
Off Havana the ocean is green this morning of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather straps and watch the sky while three couples who have been dancing on the deck of a ship in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss each other's cheeks and call it a night. On…
The story is told of Ryokan, a teacher who lived in a small hut, that one day while walking along a potato field, he was overtaken by the desire to shit. Now the owner, who was suffering a series of thefts, had hidden nearby. When he saw Ryokan all bent over he leapt up and…
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