There was a life before us my sister and I discovered, silently looking at photographs we shouldn’t have been looking at of the English girl my father was engaged to during the war. Here she is right in front of our eyes, the woman before my mother, in a black lace cocktail dress holding a…
Poetry: “A well-known circus man who was reputed to be immune from snake bites, died at the County Hospital after having been bitten by a rattlesnake.”
Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, Keep probability-some say-in view. But my advice to story-tellers is: Weigh out no gross possibilities, Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of Known instances of virtue, crime or love. To forge a picture that will pass for true, Do conscientiously what liars do- Born liars, not the lesser…
Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for…
Don’t be afraid of dying. The glass of water Is quickly poured into the waiting goblet. Your face that will be of no further use to mirrors Grows more and more transparent, nothing is hidden. It’s night in the remotest provinces of the brain, Seeing falls back into the great sea of light. How strange…
She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man,…
Trying to protect his students’ innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time. The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak…
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as…
THE MASSIVE SWASTIKA, twenty meters in size, can only be seen from the air in autumn, when the larch trees turn a yellowish brown and stand out against the evergreen forest. Had the pattern been sown in the distant past, it would have been visible only to a higher being. At halftime, the marching band…
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially…
Poetry: “At least, not in the pages of Billboard Magazine / Which chronicled showbiz scuttlebutt in the days / When entertainments were an in-the-flesh affair.”
