for R. F. One whose son has died has to forgive the boys who still live, when they come up the street slowly in a ragged group, talking, three with mitts, one with the ball. Should forgive, and does. And a man whose marriage has broken under his hard pressures or hers has to blink…
You could see mountains and gardens in the name almost: Cuernavaca. But not our garden, hill-hidden, notched in a valley higher than the city. It was ours after a long dinner only when we discovered the ancient stability of three: triangle and tripod. I'd never seen so many waiters, perched in nooks and corners like…
I thought of the young, who came to me then. I taught them a scheme: I said Appetite, Temperament, Discipline — have the one, follow the other, submit to the third. It's yourself that you remake, I said Yeats said. But first you must have had things happen to you. For your own sake. Appetite,…
In the last days of his life, Schubert was frequently delirious, during which time he sang continuously. Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert's Songs The text caught in his blood. Conceived in one quick sure burst, it bloomed like a flower no one-understood. This music was too pure for the piano. Half-dazed friends hearing it ascend like a thin…
When my Aunt Lera — tiny now, slow moving and slow talking — wanted to tell me about her life, she began by saying, “Curtis and me had just one . . . year . . . together.” Curdiss (the way she says it) was a genial great man by all remembrances of him, and…
Calm, cross-legged on his narrow ledge of fifteenth-century Chinese bureaucracy, a scholar gazing at a flight of birds observes what he already knows. That those wings are quick as brushstrokes is self-evident. Or that the mist is swelling just like water dropped on rice paper. There is a moon, of course, fat and pale as…
Here, the storm-darkened house: Candles lit against the gloom. We're not afraid of the dark really; Just hitting furniture moving About. The old music stand Rears lyric arms against the sky. (A room needs some height) No one plays any more But we found a lovely folio Psalter — Portobello, I think. Cantate Domino, Canticum…
In vehicles that travel only south, We camp from isle to isle and hand to mouth. You South downhill from Ozarks and from Smokies, Cockroach country, greet us Counter-Okies. California ceases at the pier; The sea itself drops off six miles from here. One town with just two things to do. No more. Become a…
Lo & behold. Yes, peat bogs in Louisiana. The dead stumble home like swamp fog, our lost uncles & granddaddies come back to us almost healed. Knob-fingered & splayfooted, all the has-been men & women rise through nighttime into our slow useless days. Live oak & cypress counting these shapes in a dance human forms…
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