None of this seems real, seen from the east and older. The red-eyed Guernsey bull, his warning signal stopped by the stooks of corn. This wilderness is Thickly Settled and the Berkshires’ blue surrounds my day. In Amherst, everything checked in its fall: sacrificial stance of thistle, flash of pumpkins in the field, tomatoes…
Almonds that meet the aroma of horses, and apple orchards in October, oaths sworn in dawn mist, the porgy roaming the ocean floor with one eye open to the sea. I hold you near my elbow, and far away on the mountain you gather the soaked grain that the orphaned Assyrian carries to his mother….
A blind student lives in the room closet to the courtyard. When he descends with his dog we step deftly out of the way and say hello. He is good and his dog is good but sometimes you gasp as he approaches a curb or a group talking with their backs turned and want to…
Why does one say that the heart sings? when it is not the heart, but the voice that does: if the leg could sing, it might; if the pump lodged in the chest could sing, it would make such clear deep sounds, as only that cellist makes, playing Bach, the man of the brook, whose…
Across an alley, opposite exactly my window: Intensive Care Unit. At night I’ll sit in my dark and stare into its greenly lit lucidity: I can almost read the X-rays hung on the wall — two bad ghost pears, the lungs . . . Plasma bottles glister, beep-machines, a blur of women and men in…
Men who do not wear watches know The sad infusion a concave glass Withholds. A life readies For forgetfulness its forward distances, But these wheels return their moment In the thrash of sex. When afterwards You ask what time it is, I cannot forswear How near we are to that far country Where the sun…
We counted the epochs with venerable names, with dry thorns, with dry asphodel — Justinian, Mavrikios, the Androniki Kommini Paleologi, Mr. Manouil with his long worry beads made of thick amber — “Renowned city” they called it; “the cloud-topped stronghold of all that is Greek”; and the three reservoirs opposite the illustrious Sea of Myrtoo…
We only want to count you, boys, to find out who and where you are. We don’t need a draft. We do need to know where we can find you, just for the files. I wouldn’t worry, it would be a lottery, and you are lucky. You might as well go down and sign up…
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…
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