On the Recovery of Ancient Literature
Sometime in an Oxford Greek class in 1895, a professor got off on a tangent about the vast repositories of long-lost ancient texts that might be lying preserved in the hot sands of Upper Egypt….The following year, Egyptian authorities converted what remained of the mineral-rich dirt to fertilizer.
Circumstances of my Death, Preferred
1. Bad gumbo. 2. While walking down an alley, Upper East Side, film-noir/cartoon-splat!: a pea-green piano falling from a fourth-floor window or thereabouts. 3. Falling from a fourth-floor window or thereabouts. 4. Eighty years old, at home, with friends, conversation about Rasputin. 5. Sponge-diving. 6. My son driving, in a Republican funk: exuberant splurt of […]
Ted Hughes is Dead
I. Ted Hughes has died and gone to Hell. Most of the time he died as a human, Almost every time with his eyes open. The first time he died, he was a woman crawling on hands and knees, through the churning belly of a factory: with spindles, the spools, the creaking levers with copper […]
Recovery
On Allie’s fourteenth birthday, Christopher felt his hard-won sanity begin its retreat—right there at the kitchen table. It started as he watched Allie, his step-daughter, try to tell Cyndi, her mother, stories about their day at Christopher’s parents’ ranch: the picnic, the piñata, the horseback riding—their birthday traditions. Cyndi was just as absent from the […]
Old Europe, Astral America
“France is just a country. America is a concept.”
-Jean Baudrillard
The Car Tree Game
There’s a man claiming to have seen a giant squid. He says it came up close to the edge of the bay, swimming in T-waves, and shaking a little bit. He says it probably would have eaten him alive, but that he got away just in time.
Poems
1. we drove up the long hill to the top of the cemetery she showed me how they portioned off the dead the Serbians here, the Blacks on the other side, then the Greeks at the end. I got out of the idling car and walked up the hill to the grave. the snow had […]
Return to Hue, Vietnam
The heat veil descends the third week of July and the market vendors feel its suffocation. Next to the stall of spices, a woman holds a cleaver, perched just an arm’s length from the spiked jackfruit shell. She brings it down with the force of one hacking through bones. Squatting on sidewalk corners, the gossipmongers […]
My Viking
My Viking stood at six-foot-eight, barrel-chested and ginger haired. His breath always tasted of dark rich beer and his moustache tickled my lips. Sometimes when I was doing the crossword or watching people through my window he would come up behind me, sling me up across his shoulders and carry me off as his booty. […]
Poems
Mack’s Conversion Skimming back and forth across the Holy Land, Elijah felt the need to set down his chariot and he did so upon the banks of the Jordan. He came to a small tavern near to that spot wherein a great man of Laodicea was holding forth. The two mocked each other to their […]
Dogmael
I can’t say I’m anything to be anyone to be saying a thing about it, but I’s heard it enough, I have, as much as any. But it was, gah, it was over yonder ways near Bristhlewaight or Skinnamarok or what’s-the-town. What’s that town, Geoff, north the forest up there yonder? Place where they strung […]
Two Short Pieces About Love
I. The old man and the old woman have been married for many years. Scattered around their small house are indications of the time that has passed; a doll the husband brought back from Japan, in a paper-thin kimono that would crumble to dust if touched; a wall that still bears traces of the crayon […]
Desperately Seeking Franny
The first two times I read Franny and Zooey, I was going through, to borrow a phrase from Salinger, a “blue period.” I have come to identify these low times with the term “melancholy,” a gloomy Victorian adjective that has taken on the power of a noun in my vocabulary. I have started countless sentences […]
Bones
“I saved a man’s life today.” She’s asleep. I climb into bed. My mouth hovers hot over her ear. “I saved a man’s life today.” That does it. She rolls over and has this medusa look. Quickly, I drop and pretend to be asleep before her eyes focus, but I’m not under the covers. “Fuck […]
