“They said it was the most just of wars because it was against barbarians.” Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle 1. An Irate Official Aren't they going to attack? What do they mean with their casual demand for tribute and provisions? We're a ten-gated city, not a cluster of hovels at a dusty crossroads….
The statues of Greek Gods In the storage room of the art school Where I led Pamela by the hand— Or was it she who led me? Bit my ear, while I raised her skirt. Identical Apollos held identical Empty hands. Poor, imitations, I thought. They belong in a window Of a store going out…
At the airport waiting for our plane, we sat next to a Chinese man. He took off his shoe and sock and massaged his foot, working his thumb and fingers over the sole and delicate arch of the instep. Then he held his whole foot between his palms and forgave it, rocking it gently back…
My deepest secret but not my weight and credit rating. The not-I burns the day-care center somewhere near the edge of the non-example in northern Nicaragua because pity has a pre-modern ten-year-old face with a hundred and eighty handpainted freckles. My repetitions but not my death. It was either a new car or staying home…
What we wondered as kids about the light in the icebox I'm wondering now about love. The apple digesting itself in the pantry. The corpse in need of a shave. All that goes on when no one's around to see it or say what it means. All the king's horses fed to the dogs, the…
At the crowded Ganges once I hitched a ride with tour-group tourists in their bus— They'd let me join them for that trip to the airport through seven miles of city, more of countryside. The members of that group wore wide-brimmed straws, sipped Cokes they'd brought along, showed each other trinkets they had bargained for,…
I'm not trying to manipulate reality, please put that grain of sand back where you got it, thanks, but above all—way high up, above cities, clouds, classes— to make you see, and me write, the silent tip of the talking iceberg, putting one word in front of another. Not I, but the Gross National Product,…
In Soweto today, two black men, one in the rulers' blue, one in civilian drab—ankle-length britches, a shirt whose once-distinct stripe has faded— faced one another. Each believed the other would take what the believer had—his power, his life— and believed that he, in that instant of history, embodied the force of history. I do…
I love the gold haloes of the saints in Giotto's frescoes of the legend of St. Francis. I love the plainness of the story, plain as the Saint's brown habit. In the Basilica at Assisi, lying on my back with my binoculars, my feet on my guidebook, I trace the tale in fragments. He is…
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