The fat man with purple sores all over his legs is looking at me, and I am elaborately not looking at him, as we wait for children to clear the pool and laps to begin. Shall I call the lifeguard? I’m afraid of the fat man with his almost-open sores I don’t tell her, and […]
Nothing the poet at the podium has read is as achieved as his shirt, which is white, so white a white its very shadows are Antarctic, a pronouncement of magnificent power, able to make immaculate a few yards of cloth in this dirty world, if only for a morning, before he sweats at the pits […]
reads: THE CLOCK IS TICKING. What brings my red Irish face among the blackest of black faces, crêpe to crow, applicants waiting in lines that snake to the street, even the guards and low-level functionaries one paycheck from the street themselves, who move languidly from office to office, or hunch, two or three at […]
An old grandfather with half-closed eyes and yellow beard slumps early with drink on the steps of my clinic, acting out his affliction under a marble arch. Every excess leaves a scar– If only he had chosen love for his addiction, he might have drunk that cup to its secret, sweet, muddy dregs […]
A week before the lease was finished and I had to leave that place, iris and lilac exhaled urgent freshness over the yard, breathing from purple tissue so tender as to be torn by sunlight. In the morning a moon hung at the end of every street, testing the limit of fullness, soon to be […]
In October, three postcards come from wandering friends: a cottage on a cliff, with hollyhocks leaning over the sea; fat beds of lavender resuscitated at Giverny; the brief bluebell wood at Brooklyn Botanic. Why do they put these gardens upon me? I’ve got no lease to these rooms, I’m too old, it’s too late, […]
Without my knowing, the clasp opened on the subway platform, a clatter on the tiles I only hear in retrospect, and now someone else must be enjoying my watch with its Navajo turquoise, much admired by friends, by my doctor of ten years, who is ill himself now, and takes no calls. Was it […]
This flashing creature, my niece, dives to the blue bottom to fetch something I’ve thrown there. Sudden knowledge strikes me: I am not the person everyone was waiting for, but she might be, undine, this slip so whiteblond and blue, poet for whom all the journals are searching, teacher, immunologist, secret saint, person to […]