Now I'm Rembrandt's age when he died. For years I've been tracking his self-portraits in the museums of Europe and America, watching the bright eyes of his twenties gradually sadden into old age. In those last portraits he seems to be saying, “I have seen enough, lost enough, died enough.” But when I look at…
You are right, but your patch isn't big enough. —Jesse Jackson When a cure is found and the last panel is sewn into place, the Quilt will be displayed in a permanent home as a national monument to the individual, irreplaceable people lost to AIDS—and the people who knew and loved them most. —Cleve Jones,…
I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions of daylight, falling as dusk across your page make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think I see that gesture in the way you use language. And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers dried and fired on the ironstone rim of the saucer…
Under pressure Mick tells me one of the jokes truckers pass among themselves: Why do women have legs? I can't imagine; the day is too halcyon, beyond the patio too Arizonan blue, sparrows drunk on figs and the season's first corn stacked steaming on the wicker table. . . .I give up; why do they?…
Tom heals best in the dreamless portion where nerves are quiet trees in winter. He opens his eyes in the middle of the night and feels better. He has nothing left: no maps of the way back, no green cry of wild parrots. Morning sleep may carry in its steaming kettle of images—little for the…
I am the daughter who went out with the girls, never checked back in and nothing marked my “last known whereabouts,” not a single lavender petal. Horror is partial; it keeps you going. A lost child is a fact hardening around its absence, a knot in the breast purring Touch, and I will come true….
When I was eight weeks pregnant, dazzling in black watersilk and moony, bloodstone earrings, demimonde, decoupage, the Inkspots fingering “Blue Indigo” above my swelling ivories, short at the waist and dripping dark, adoring swans over the slow backwater of my knees, he ripped the fabric, breast to pubis, such as I would be later torn:…
Old guy goes downstairs reeling and shying at newel and banister while how his feet once blistered the treads is what he is recalling, for the young know how to balance. Christ help all who wobble, stagger, trip, step double, and are their own hindrance, oh help them. The day is fine out, bright cold,…
This is how it happened. Spring wore on my nerves— all that wheezing and dripping while others in galoshes reaped compost and seemed enamored most of the time. Why should I be select? I got tired of tearing myself down. Let someone else have the throne of blues for a while, let someone else suffer…
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