On December 8, 2015, French President François Hollande announced plans to posthumously award the Legion of Honour to the one hundred and thirty victims of the terrorist attacks of November 13 at the Bataclan concert hall and the surrounding area. The institution’s Grand Chancellor disagreed. Since its creation on May 19, 1802, by Napoléon Bonaparte,…
It was just a B-grade submarine movie (or maybe all sub movies are B-grade), a vehicle for John Wayne, whose drawling virility I always resent, while Patricia Neal plays his ex-wife, though off-screen her lover Gary Cooper visited the set to try to persuade her to abort their fetus. And after all the khaki, depth…
For years I lived on the mountain, but I never drank from the high stream where it flashes over gray scree on its way down to the valley after percolating through the glacier that holds grains of carbon and pollen, maize and grasses, smoke, plague and famine, spores of fungus on the manure of cattle,…
It was almost vulgar the way that it was just so pronounced, how innocent they were. —photojournalist Lynsey Addario, 3.15.22 On the front page of the newspaper this morning, there was a photograph of a mother and her children killed by a Russian mortar round as they tried to flee across a ruined bridge. They…
Sunrise lines a cloud: flamingo silk in an old fur coat. Seagulls catch the wind like scraps of paper. She’s been up for hours, wrapped in her old plaid bathrobe. Migraine. Lightning flashes behind her eyelids. She drinks her coffee and writes: the tattered world. Later there will be champagne and candlelight Phone calls from…
Ripe olives drop from the tree, grapes glow green in the sun, bursting, already smelling a little of decay. A thousand miles away, the emperor slogs through mud with his grumbling soldiers. His son is worthless, possibly insane. At night in his tent he writes of odd accidental pleasures: bread splitting its crust in the…
My witchy hair so furious and alive stands up and crackles like a scratched 78 Galli-Curci singing from the moon Sempre libera! It’s an owl’s nest twigs and feathers and bones and rain a straw broom forgotten in a corner but still capable of spontaneous combustion so watch out. There’s joy in taking your final…
Behind us, centuries of child brides split open in childbirth peasants fleeing bent under sacks of grain small boys who hid in the outhouse when the soldiers came for the family. Every one of us a survivor of survivors. Ishmael waves as he floats by on a coffin. Even the one-eyed cat slinking off round…
When we first met, you said you hoped to write a place as yet unwritten, maybe here, the last of the café’s lunch crowd clearing out with a soft ceramic clink and spray of light through glass to glaze your dark cascade of hair. It’s not Manhattan, after all: it’s not a place for public…
The last time we ever spoke Missouri suburbs filled with snow and snowfall blotted out the oak beyond your buried patio. You’d never see another spring. Falls . . . confusion . . . vertigo . . . Familiar landmarks vanishing, you stood up from your wheelchair. Where did you think you were going? Across…
Memory care makes final introductions to residents whose names have slipped away at the slightest pressure, evanescent syllables for those who will not be here long, mere bubbles in a froth of foam, more transient than resident, some transitioning, not to another gender, but to another state of being altogether. Are you in the bathtub?…
Reconstituted voices, scraps of cloud caught in branches, the morning campfire of Pu-erh tea or mown hay of white peony, an old man’s blaser hanging on its peg, the human funk of toasted cumin seeds, oak burnt to ashes, cinerulent fox fur, crapy grape leaves in late November, a shirred old pumpkin, the soap and…
