Surely the heavens don’t play favorites? No, of course not, yet there is a hue that can be heard when what is meets what might be and the color of cherish develops in the center of the sky canto 20 my mother called and said, Come. Come over now, to see your father, who, when […]
interlude my mother is fond of the claim of gardens, gardens and time. that her garden is an image of the seasons to come, the naked rose prefiguring colors to come, new life to come some image of the forwardness of movements, some shape of the future, like an appearance of forms in the closer […]
interlude but the dream is unmanageable. The dream is not language or poetry; it’s not a dog or a brother or a sentiment sentimentalizable in script, Spanish, Arabic, Coptic, English, Chinese or hand-made grammars for the deaf or red warnings tacked up for the mischievous to read. I once took a no dream pill, one […]
interlude my, my father’s, my mother’s, my brother’s dog, a great Labrador retriever goes down the stairs he’d always feared sideways, like a fat horse. And then under the sun I wrap that kindhearted thickness of him with my arms to some (just some) resistance, then I feel his muscles under my muscles relax and […]
canto 19 reexamined there are inflictions where the eyes may never close, because when closed the eyes remain lit: imagine Thor with his hammer and his lock pick picking and a car slowly, on the edge of his knowing, pulling outside the hindrances of light, meaning into dark where the guilty hide, Thor working at […]
canto 19 Thor came with beer and a sling hugged arm and on the evening balcony he told me about the desert he remembered on a drive from an old life to a new life, here, where, a beer in his good hand, he gave an image of a coyote with a hat and boots, […]
canto 18 yes, my father, larger than life told me deepsleeping stories, how the young and the old, the hairless and bearded, the thin and the large, would leave their beds with images of sleep in their eyes and in their hands and in their pockets and in their bags and in their stomachs. the […]
canto 17 finally it came to be that after dinner with my mother and father my father put the truth on his desk, the same desk at which he’d expressed his years of work with deepsleeping sleepers into published papers, a book, at the desk where, I remember well, one evening, he reached for the […]
interlude yes hale health holy sprang from spora communalus, but are they related in the wide etymologies of war, worship, and loss, breeding in those strange orchards of words, bursting in those empty memory marks and sordid other orthographical and inherited imaginings, breeding creatures that will walk the earth round and after years of labor […]
interlude my father knew that healthy and hale have ancient roots in the notion of wholeness, but he would ask: what does it mean? this wholeness of the holy, this root that goes so deep. I feel, he would say, that I’m missing something, missing something in the obviousness of things, that in the stone […]
canto 16 Imelda showed me her forbidden places. The map of these is grand, spread wide on the table of maps for pointing to, identifying, marking with a finger, and from the edges one can simply stitch on new maps prohibited only by surface and time and the weather, which may move in quickly and […]
in Henry’s truck we crossed the boundary of the city, which is near impossible to figure, crossed a small space of road and entered under an archway sign that said: The Meadows which is neither meadow nor not meadow but acres upon acres of daffodil, rose, phlox, apple and peach tree, and more such trees, […]
canto 14 one day things and places turned unfamiliar. my apartment, the woman I watched from the balcony who lived next door, (taller, she seemed, and when she raised a coffee to me in that peach-colored tulip, she winked), the little bottles, the packages, the implements in the bathroom cabinet, the cans, bags, and boxes […]
interlude it is often said requirements are required of certain holy books: one is that they contain utterances of the deity in a time and place readers and hearers know only as dust between the fingers. often, it’s said, epics require this too. two is that those utterances may not be uttered on the most […]
interlude all readers and listeners have heard the moralist moral away on one of one hundred favorite lessons and conditions, which may be true, untrue, fabricated, or conjectured, and all readers and listeners will set their timers and wait for news to come of the moralist’s fall, shriveling before the videotape of failed sobriety, while […]