the newspaper boy once told melove is loud. scream three times each day, and someone will at least feed you: sugar-snap peas thrown, showeringlike hail, macadamia nutsscattered like words, even safflower seeds sprinkling the nest of their bowl. after i peckthrough the glistening barswith my beak, the pearly queenhops over, bare feet tapping the linoleum
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To think there is such a thingas a good dayis to neglect the sun’s eternal indifferenceto the clouds and fogthat bottle it up invisibleand block its raysfrom reaching our foreheads. What kindof
Our first date is at an Italian restaurant in the Upper East
(Where neither photography nor sketching were allowed) I. The freighted thud of
At Sunday lunch, Jim’s dad almost chokes on a mouthful of mashed potatoes. His mom said she wanted to visit her sister in Florida over Christmas. His dad swallows. “No way in
Eden Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays brought up in belief before it was mine bible thumping, backneck kinda indoctrination on our hands and knees before the Lord that everlasting ache in the rib of Eve subservient, superpassible by the
The synthesizer forgetting and remembering itself. The four slow notes of time; descending breath of God.It helps that the fish get stranger as you go, and the children either fall asleep or silent. Young
Monk I Driving the I-90 I met a Monk. Monk and I became friends of a material wealth. One day Monk pricked a flower from between the highway cracks and told me to put
The Wildcat Den The sunset drapes gold and pink over the city,melting against adobe walls,where murals breathe storiesof ancestors who once danced in the dust.The scent of carne asada curls through the
Dad teaches me how to make rice: “Measure the rice with your heart, then fill the water to your knuckle.” The tap fills the black pot as a cloud of starch rises.
I’d just hopped on an airplane, on my way home from a tennis weekend with friends, when my daughter, Elana called—a phone call that would send me reeling. “M-o-o-o-o-o-m-m-m-m-m,” she wailed. It
Divorced and in my fifties, I entered a relationship with Ben. At 64, he was compact, attractive, and also divorced, with wavy gray hair, and hips even slimmer than mine. Ben’s tender,
It’s nearly dark and the moon’s unrisen.The brightest stars shine through a scrim of clouds and fog. I am watching for you.Most of the neighbors have gone inside for dinner and television
And if I did mean somethingcoded: waterI can’t walk on, coastline charred from anothernameless fire blazinga red wood, photographsrecovered in the oceanoff an archipelago, preserving for posteritythe dinghies and the sheep.And if
