Evening Light
Let’s meet where the tables are empty at 7. I can remember, and so do not have to imagine, the April evening light coming in off the bricks, through the glass rattled like snare skin by the bass thrum of busses and trucks on 65th. The tables round and black, they really are like pools of emptiness with glasses of water suspended by life’s magic antigravity effect, to say nothing of the orbits of planets, that successful reluctance to plummet into their suns, even when life may not have begun on most of them, there is no one to meet, no table taking the evening light back into...
Read MoreNothing New
Knowing my father’s soon to die, I dreamt of Heaven, a wide deck suspended over a highway. I was checking it out as a care facility— the chairs and chaise lounges rickety things, woven plastic straps lashed to aluminum tubing. There were areas out of the glare, under corrugated green fiberglass awnings up on wrought-iron struts. And the dead all about were milling in variable states of haze, in tennis outfits, bathing suits. Where were the courts, the pools? No conversation—only the drone of the road below. Nothing new to learn from that real-world song. I left for the parking garage....
Read MoreBefore It Disappeared
He sinks away, less himself and more a swollen sessile mass planted in its hospice bed, his eyes’ whites like pond ice, his lips unlicked and cracked, his teeth in gluey jackets, voice a scratchy aftermath of what he meant to say and can’t, each breath his chest’s next fight with gravity — it asks the question. The question springs itself, up from the lumpen flesh, the sinking country of his body, and with all this history in evidence, we, who lean against the rails in reverence, we cannot pose the question properly. The fox who watched us as we walked the creek-side trail through...
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