for Dawn Chin, a student from Korea You're barely twenty. Your last essay for me begins: “Until I realized the value of life, I sure went through a lot of anguish of the heart.” All our Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays together, I put in of and the and couldn't explain why we say, “I tried to…
What in the sour wind Made the voices come again And the trees begin To move in? Spoken to And spoken for, You were waited upon And waiting. The leaves woke On the windcombed branches, And the footed trunks Not in twos advanced But like a lightless fire From the hill descended. * * * You…
All identity is active statement. —George Steiner 1. A file of dated letters and a voice the important survivor agrees at last to your visit, two days for your recorder. What you know, you review, earliest meetings, estrangements, awkward returnings, rumors and echoes of rumors, questions, a desire to breathe that air. Finally hours of…
Dipping our shoulders under with each lunge we twelve far-pregnant women stride the shallow children's pool stretching our bulbous bodies out. Blue pool. White light. Late afternoon: the beams surge low and full. “The sun is god.” A dozen heads rock: shrugs pushing the shimmer of round into flat. Each color tends to color the…
Consider that I have loved you for forty-nine years, that I have loved you since childhood despite the storms that have wasted my life. . . . I have loved you, I love you and will continue to love you, and I am sixty-one years old, I know the world and have no illusions. —Hector…
In a dirt village near Sierra Plata, men who are their own shadows, their own wives, drive flatbeds to the taverns; sweat-stained, with gold dust stuffed in little sacks that dangle along the hard edges, the steel curves of their bodies. Tense as switchblades, they wait for the finger-touch of a woman, a thief, or…
Who in his right mind would hold the brothers to blame? They lived in their own mental torment, unrelieved by day or their own lies. The sun dropped like a stone one night and the brothers talked on. The past, the son, the younger people in their life. The garden. The heart can approach the…
On my knees in the dark I looked out the front door of my parents' house and across the street saw an identical stoop, the porthole glass wreathed in pine boughs with a flat red bow. I knew if I crossed the street and entered, taking living room, stairwell and landing in reverse, I'd end…
All night I search the dead for inspiration. Outside, the lawns have turned to wilderness. Plows turning the snow. Gusts of wind dissolve in a tangle of elms. Ice forms on the new roof. Weakens it. Too much trying has finally ended. No one seems ever to come or to go. Only the taillights of…
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