Sometimes driving home from the library at night I take the long way leading out of town past Buttermilk Road and the paper mill where there is one light on and the nightwatchman between rounds stares through a golden cubicle, his back to the moon rising on summer nights so he can see each vehicle…
I've bicycled out into the blue fieldlight to glimpse them: a few flecks zigzagging down a hillside. drawn to the lighted compounds igniting at this hour and echoing the sky. Before long they stop, shy of a smell or barbed wire, circling on old pissed-on ground yellowed once more, and wait. Once, as a child…
The boat sailing over from the island dock, about to capsize near the harbor buoy, was a splash of red and white paint his father knew would catch the boy's eye. We act from feelings, his father said, and unlike the fine detail of foam lacing the white-capped water, true action lives in the beauty…
It's their not knowing how they must die. The emptiness of their beautiful eyes. The heat and damp and pulse of their breaths, the way joy seizes them like a miniature death— and no shame in it.
I don't know if I have lost as much as you but last night I lay awake listening to the pipes purl on and this old house give and wheeze, leaving port for who knows where. You probably know all about lying awake, the recommended counting backwards, the dark which is empty which is forgetting…
—on the film by Jean Renoir My wife says they might be Laurel and Hardy: the thin, future son-in-law, Anatole, and the fat father of his Henriette, who clown with fishing poles at the river's edge. Pike! the fat one says. And the thin one—Did you say: the shark that lives in fresh water? Cuts…
My father stands and sways before the mirror, in the blue tiled bathroom, shaving. The wide legs of his boxer shorts empty as windsocks, the neck of his white cotton undershirt fringed with curly black hairs. My mother is asleep. Overnight his shaving brush has stiffened into the shape of a flame. When he swirls…
You're going to waste away in dreams so thin they'll slide down a long straw and disappear in a stream going counterclockwise in Tasmania. We're having fritters and syrup, wheatcakes and strawberry butter, double-roasted coffee, and heavy cream. It's your summer solstice, blue green basic morning. This is positively your last chance. I mean it….
Better to have three announcers trip over each other's tongues than let silence go out like a lethal gas over the airwaves, as if silence were anything but a figment of our imaginations— when one sound stops another is always right there to take its place, so where would we ever have heard it— even…
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