Everyone lived by thinking about flight. —Herta Müller In Milan a man imagines the devil. It is 1452, perhaps earlier. The Americas are only a merchant’s dream. The man holds a brush and a palette of egg yolk and dried red pigment. The duke is paying him to paint the Devil and the Tower and …
And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. —Genesis 32:24 A man came upon Jacob in prayer and put him in a headlock, and when he wrestled free,the man tried to use a single-leg takedown, but Jacob was too quick. —Oh, choreography of prayer, the …
Sometimes you wake me from my dream with a low, trembling moanthat rises almost to a scream before I wake you from your own.Then you describe it in detail, as if to make it come untrue— the smoke or silence or betrayal that just occurred to you.This morning, though, you didn’t seem to want to …
Then there’s crush hour, which comes and goes on quieter tires. Again the traffic slowsas residential streets congest with Fordsthe same age as their drivers, rolling towards houses they will pointedly roll by.Their low beams are embarrassing the sky.The orangina sun has ducked behinda middle school, and will come out to blind only the girl …
It’s been way too long since I sat on a handrail in an open stairwell and let gravity help medescend to the next level, arms and legs extended for perilous balanceas I surf a frozen wave, pants buffng the banister while I glide over the steps my feet don’t have to take to get down …
Men remind her every day to take her pills and how precious that she writesso vicious she considers a bulldozer her body the soft organs of ita stomach and the lining acidic and accepting of what she puts there or notand what about the hands one palmed flattened on a page the other balled fistedaround …
I jumped against the sky expecting I would find another sky. A subtlety to sky.I wanted to get to know the sky better. I wanted to breathe in the air. The sky as a blank space.Or maybe the opening to a decent conversation.If you’re using a camera you can pose against the sky and people …
Do savor that peculiar sweetness of seaweed flowing like sleep in the brackish current.They will not always be this way, the land and the sea. There will be too much salt and not enoughfresh water in the estuary. The sea and river will meet, and the river will give itself up by the mouth as …
Soft as a Claude painting, the yellow sky tonight— trees in the parking lot still thick, though the air, yes, has an edge, the honey was solid in the jarwhen I opened it this morning, found a single ant frozen in the dunes, stunned by sweetness.Can you really die of sweetness? Hardto say yes, though …
There was a black reflecting pool in the center of the garden. Guarding it, a pair of lion statues at the top of the steps, looking down.Pink azaleas gone frothy by the pool’s edge, then tiers of boxwood, pines— I know because of the photographs, my attempts to take.Something in the water let it be …