I have no memory of it. I believe a river caught up with us when we curved the foot of the mountain. Men and women got off the bus to drink. My father cupped his hands and I gulped mouthfuls. Snow patches led the way to the cool black smoke of the woods. […]
i I’m surprised by purple crocuses on the way home and the farther I look the more they multiply a kind of secret reunion with family long lost, relatives whom I welcome in other forms because it’s Spring, and the weather is full of arrivals: I see you now, Grandfather – little storm gathering […]
I once read in a poem that the heart rests between beats. My suitcase holds three books, a nightgown and clothes for six days. It takes five and a half hours to drive to Harlem. My grandmother sleeps until 11. I leave Portland at 9. We have dinner at our favorite restaurant on LaSalle Street. […]
I walk to Library Park and watch the sun set. There are days of cold ahead. The oak is an etching— an outline, her twisted branches reaching like swollen broken fingers fighting the fracturing cold. The firmament blushes. Each figment of her bark recedes until she is but one stoic profile of complicated, […]
When I think of how windfarms form scything crucifixes on the horizon, with Jesus and his thieves cutting their arms through the air, with a deeply pervasive thwum-thwum-thwum that could be the swishing heartbeat of air, and how Martin Healy was aware of them always as a curse on the land, as he carried […]
India runs away the moment I arrive but when I have to leave, it gathers at my feet — a monsoon that won’t let go, a capricious child. I remember dirt, red and soft like bodies of deer. Statues smile and frown in the temple. Drums so loud they beat a god […]
Inside a Buddhist temple, inside a cave, among tall golden statues, I feel nothing. I think of nothing. I look around, wonder if taking photographs is allowed. On their knees, eyes shut, natives and tourists rock back and forth as though straining together to give birth. I imagine a single firefly stumbling […]
It’s snowing in a way that reminds me of people who rarely complain. I imagine the oldest woman eating bread: silent, half asleep, softly chewing mngna, mngna, mngna. I am thankful for snow and the black stillness of evergreens the way they line up on the street here in my New England. […]