Long ago—when measured by a single life— On a typewriter, and owing to the kindness of your Nature, you wrote a letter (from your Brookline Garret’s desk) that traveled, seed-like, Landing on my kitchen table in Ft. Greene where … Read More
In a breath that slips through a tiny door inside the leaves, we talk about the necessity of gravy, as if it’s the vote for higher minimum wage for the long nights of tallying up receipts in the lost … Read More
A red-tailed hawk in its coat of folded wings perches on the peak of my neighbor’s roof, in its talons the clasped prey, some mammal or other—some pest one should be glad has met its master, though it’s bad … Read More
Some black words, black as good soil, blacker than bull calves blocking the road where trucks idle, blacker than the oil belly of a thunderhead, unload wine-black the scouring rain, and deluge is the answer. Some words are coup … Read More
That’s what Jamie called them, when we met in prison and he spoke of love: “There was this great big woman,” he said— “big heart, trouble getting around, so I helped her, we went to all the homeless camps … Read More
Now on this first warm day I wake alone. Leafy on my bed of sunlit sheets thinking of green and leaves like hands on my body. Your hands. The earth pokes up its little signals everywhere: the snowdrops and … Read More
George Burns, at 99, puffing on his cigar, confided to us That his doctor had warned him to stop smoking—then noted That his doctor had died many years ago. Probably Not a bad doctor. For many years, I had … Read More
The year that she was three, my daughter was a fox for Halloween— orange felt hood with ears, a tail stitched to her back, and painted-on whiskers— the only girl in the preschool parade not dressed as a princess. … Read More
I say I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but of course I do. Like buttercups in a meadow, I think: paralyzed; because of course I am stuck in myself. Ten thousand words on the tip of my tongue, … Read More
From the house barely, nakedly, burningly driven into pasture beyond— bad daughter thrown across acres without even her mother’s shawls and pillows. Where to sleep where hopping things won’t hop and nest in her hair—why thrown out, why not … Read More