Poetry

A Novel of Jane Austen’s

She turned into the drawing-room for privacy, but Henry and Eleanor had likewise retreated thither, and were at that moment deep in consultation about her. She drew back, trying to beg their pardon, but was, with gentle violence, forced to return . . . —Northanger Abbey When Henry and his sister Eleanor brought Miss Morland…

The Scarecrow

Love is the hardest rock and the fragile, brine-drenched      ships, love is the other ship of rock, the untraveled, yet      thousand-times traveled ship on the highest seas — oh the chafing of patience — with love I fashioned death,      with love also my work; I went down — he said — to the town market,…

Kansas: before the war

They are everywhere in the wild lights past the hammering of the dawn, the colors shooting off those sounds, and she can talk to them, she says, “communicate” in the same way distant cousins lean over corpses and say something appropriate but inaccurate. Stars cinder where the jungle ends, at the furthest outskirt of the…

Dilettantism

We’ve read much, we’ve forgotten much. Afterward we      unlearned all we had learned — what lead and what gold seals — forgeries, counterfeits, rub outs with a razor blade, a penknife, with gum erasers      or a fountain pen; and the new script spreading on the parchment, betraying the usurper of others’ perogatives and titles, the…

Eternity

The time comes when you count the names — whether Dim or flaming in the head’s dark, or whether In stone cut, time-crumbling or moss-glutted. You count the names to reconstruct yourself. But a face remembered may blur, even as you stare At a headstone. Or sometimes a face, as though from air, Will stare…

Shooting Pool

Pool tables always reminded me of paintings by Tanguy— objects connected to each other by shadows on an uncertain ground. I would stare down the shaft of light on the stick, distracted by the desire to lie down on the green moss of the table, the desire to treat the balls as gently as eggs…

Improvised Achievement

He took off his watch, wound it, undressed. One      movement to unfold the blanket. And he remained like that. He had      forgotten something. There was something he hadn’t finished. The      obstacle: perhaps that red sack on the chair, perhaps the black cap on the trunk. And automatically he turned toward the dark mirror. Inside there:…