Good Professor, I’m glad you weren’t my father! The little gods and demons fall in across your desk like infantry — Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan toys, spanning two millennia. Some wear hats with horns, others horned helmets. Athletic satyrs and jackal-headed women stand uniformly muscular. The old in robes, larger, watch us, smiling, satisfied they’ve outlived…
She’s mending the hem of a favorite dress her bare back pressed against a stove that’s cold for the first time in months — in flannel she felt ugly. But now it’s April the snow broken up by trumpeting jonquils — yellow and green they call her out to the porch buckled by winter’s weight….
(suggested by parts of Petrarch's Sonnet 98) In Heaven speakers touch voices on voices And God shines on the nearness of each voice (No need for asking or hesitation) with such love As guides the small light of stars at their exact and remote distances. Even so are pure and simple acts, offered in kindness,…
I killed a fly and laid my weapon next to it as one lays the weapon of a dead hero beside his body — the fly that tries to mount the window to its top; that was born out of a swamp to die in a bold effort beyond itself, and I am he that…
From the very first evening we met, I knew I’d fallen helplessly, unredemptively, in love, becoming, in the next few months, chronically sick with longing, unable to sleep without first constructing elaborate courtship fantasies in which his sculpted, unblemished face appeared at my door, smiling, perfect lips parted. . . . What’s worse, we became…
Eager to cut loose forever, we walked along the railroad tracks of 1965 wondering how we would ever react to the appearance of a goddess. If one emerged from the gas station wearing a polyester uniform, or if we found one sunbathing naked in private on the bank of the creek, her hair tied back…
I had a father of my own. How was it possible I was a father when I was yet a child of my father? I grew panicky and thought of running away, but I knew that if I did I would be scorned for it by my father, and so I stood still and listened…
1959, 1971, 1953, 1942 Snow seeded the road all night, fallout plowed to one side. On this windless morning, our superintendent is shaving a path to our door, a small portion of safety. . . . It’s 1983. My friends and I sleep and wake childless. From a swing I watched my father work on…
My mother’s house was made of clematis, I think. And Clematis is what Miss White calls Mother Ghost all day. She tells her what to clean, says, Clematis, clean this. But I know Mother Ghost’s her name and she made up three songs. We sing them every Sunday when Mr. Dearing visits. And when we…
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