Monthly Archives: January 2016

In order for us to get to know one another, we’d have to take a road trip across America. I would take you to a restaurant — Open 24 Hours — alongside a freeway, any freeway we could escape on. … Continue reading →

So this is it — this, what looks like a Christmas party in an insurance office, and not a Renais- sance painting, and not as we had always thought, not some flower-strewn, some sequined curtain-call, greasepainted heroes gesturing to the walls. … Continue reading →

I can see him now, yes, I can see him, a proper Chinatown dragon with silver pompoms nodding asleep on Sundays, his hair a silver fringe, his four, six, eight, hundreds, thousands of athletic trophies, his hairless legs — crush-gong-crush- gong … Continue reading →

It is a kind of possession, reading. Willing the Other to abide in your present. Her voice, mixed with sunlight, mixed with Saturday, mixed with my going to bed and then getting up, with the pat- tern and texture of … Continue reading →

I write very slowly because I write with a need to make myself clear to someone who knows nothing about me. It is a lonely adventure. Each morning I make my way along a narrowing precipice of written words. I hear … Continue reading →

He had three rules which he imposed as essential on all aspiring writers. Carry a notebook, and write down any striking words or phrases which you hear; or which come into your mind: mark the passages in your reading which … Continue reading →

Two loves I have of comfort and despair — The reader feels a dark strain, a far off-sound — from dreaded histories, of great men and women caught in an older web of Destiny, wrecked by deeper themes, and a … Continue reading →

This morning I had to leave the church I have been attending. I had breast cancer last year and have been singing in the choir to restore my lungs, but I no longer can sing because my lungs need to … Continue reading →

And now in this bare place your step will find A twig that snaps flintlike against the mind; Then thundering above your head, Small birds dart up, through shifting sunlight fled ….. A wet gray day — rain falling slowly, … Continue reading →

He’d take the nickels off a dead man’s eyes, to buy a Coca-Cola and an Eskimo Pie The woods in Missouri on the banks of the Mis- sissippi through which I used to tramp endlessly and shoot marbles in the … Continue reading →