It is harder to see what one seesthan anyone knowsbecause it is easier, far far easierthan on can suppose. That still point of the turning world—look! this light through the petal—where there are no shadowsand where it is never a problem never to have shadows,neither haunted by undaunted . . . . Continue Reading »
At the last rock of the last ledge of the last climb, retreat blocked, he went to the edge to look over his days and ways. The earth lay below in colors. He watched it with desire, but it was spread out far far below, and was unobtainable. At his foot was a green thing—a leaf, slick and . . . . Continue Reading »
Easy to forget, how shadows are light’s creatures, out of dark, out of thinning dark come delicately, then sharply. Sun puts them there. True to the last frond, bole, blowing crest, bush’s perimeter, by light shaped from darkness their elegant black duplications silent, accurate. On the hot . . . . Continue Reading »
Settling the estate, the lawyer said. It seemed too grand a way of putting it— bills to be paid, a bank account to close, and finally her mother’s house to sell while her own, half-a-continent away, sat waiting for her with its lights on timers and neighbors dropping in to feed the fish. . . . . Continue Reading »
Here it comes again, after shimmering dead all winter, stretching, flexing, limbering, unleashing hordes of feather-cut leaves that look like dragon tongues, a silty river bronze, before they flatten to assume their summer-long, grass-emulating green. Gone in a few . . . . Continue Reading »
I Merely the look of it, buttercup at the edge of the “Lawn Falls” where the water seeps, sweeps down to the seaside is enough to carry the viewer in awe over the edge of reason to a logic beyond the modest mundane: the rocks being pitted are jointed by torrents of balm-like uproar. Love’s . . . . Continue Reading »
. . . pongee-colored girls in white dresses the sun shone through in multiple haloes where they lay alongside streets like sofas reading José Martí behind potted ferns in avenue-knolls paved with Key West grass and long-leaved tobacco shaved and scented like bark strips. . . . . Continue Reading »
The St. Jo River whirling full around the South Bend rich and dark as a negresse en chemise bedaubed with cochineal: mauve, purple tinting the water from the Odilon Redon sun setting. As we drove, the sunset fell over “The Goats” in Peru, Indiana and a crescent moon came up the color of . . . . Continue Reading »
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