Pride comes before a fall, Solomon says, but any fool knows that’s not true. Take Jesus, for example, or Gump Jaworski, who did a double half gainer and most of a triple solchow on his last day of working for Gutters ‘R’ Us (“Gutter Problems? Gutter Call Us!”) when he fell off a company ladder trying…
They say Lady Godiva put everything she had on a horse, but what if the wager had grown from speculating whether everything on earth is always growing steadily, incrementally, or whether things are inevitably falling apart? The safe bet would be the latter, of course, the smart call. You’d have gravity on your side, that…
* * * The Earth, stuffed to the gills with burning coals and consuming itself from its birth bristling with folds that sharpen into peaks, sometimes of short hairs sometimes forming dark dense beards and hollowed out with giant cavities filled with restless water from which emerged the grand debris of its genesis…
* * * Over our heads masses are moving, whitish cottony, ghosts on the weather maps Windings, swirls, languid scrolls under the sting of the wind, wandering herds Floating bodies. Appearing. Disappearing. In our own image. We, more unstable than plants fixed to the ground or the fish sheltered in water…
On the sandy path that goes by my door and leads to the station of dreams, where I had just walked, a muffled cry reached my ear. I stopped walking and saw a clump of dry, drowsy grass. The cry came from the ground. A root deplored being without news from the stem up there…
Leaning in summer tuxes across the balcony or reclining like nudes with their hair thrown back, some trees, after high conversation, complained about having to go back to the deaf earth again. The leaves pulled on their arms to keep them from going and to get even closer to whom?…
* * * Mother death you came to him so mildly so cruelly alternating authority with seduction He out-of-breath following you or fleeing you In the end you wore the features of Morphine and clasped her to you cruelly mildly I gave his body to flames married his ashes to…
It is not wholly myself, this shadow tugging itself loose as though it knew better where to go from here what to do and see before the ship leaves with the tide. Not a thousand ships, you understand, just the one. Tall and proud, I suppose, and in a dreadful hurry, what with the wind…
This is the work of your own hands strange to say, all these stories carved with a certain severity, each woodcut brought forward in strokes, a register of darkness removed. There’s a tower and a bridge. A figure midway across watches the shadows below. Midway between what? Today and tomorrow, if you like,…
It has been here as long as I have I think, settling in the sand. The current drags through like a wind, carrying small reef-building creatures to this outpost. When I was a child it looked different. It was a room then, the brass knobs spit-shined and the drawers filled with carefully folded clothes;…
I burned a hole in cloth, watching the threads shrivel back like the stockinged legs of the wicked witch of the east, who leaves no path of return so you had better keep those shoes on while you learn to grow up with your mistakes like good siblings: you will fight but make…
Was a swell commandment: drink up, sleep. She’d relinquished the vampy black and absconded to her toddler color (muddy sunset) as we, one from each grief stage, commissioned to flock her, petal’d her pale strapless, pressed the appliqué along her spine with dancer’s glue, all funds sunk into that silk, hence the wan hors d’oeuvres,…
