New England holds its antique charms for such a one as me. The woods, the waves, the poets’ graves call pilgrims seasonally. The village green in Amherst dreams of Dickinson and Frost. The shades of these speak poetry in rhymes sublime and soft. But double Concords, Salems, too, plus devious round-abouts conspire to witch my […]
Passage to Massachusetts Read More »
Dillard and Woolf waxed elegiac over its immolation in a candle’s flame—overcome, I imagine, by the surrealism of the juxtaposition: a single, innocuous wick lit to guide the path of the writer’s words morphs into a luminous siren calling a foundering craft to its swift and fiery end. But for me, a writer with no
Fourteen years this month since she first took note of Capricorn wheeling his ancient cryptogram again and again across winter skies and ushering her child into the world. He never seemed to mind sharing his show with Christmas, probably felt in his younger years a jolly Jesus-camaraderie, a knowing unalloyed by age and sophistication that
You look so awesome from this angle, the cosmic one our local meteorologists, always eager to be the first to send us news of imminent devastation, have helpfully digitized and rendered ceaselessly uploadable. Did the satellite shutter- bug catch you at your best? Would you have preferred just one more quick take, maybe to tweak
Hurricane Irma, From a Distance Read More »
All of my getting-me-to-here years, plus the place in which those years went by, have left no trace upon your memory. You even casually mused recently how we would ferry your ashes one day to England where, you said, Dad lay alone in a cemetery plot for two. As if a man who had never
The End, Beginning Read More »
You no longer remember when I call. I picture my voice as a hand waving strident outside an opaque window, hope snatching at its ragged edges, while on the other end, you stand with the receiver to your ear, gazing at a dust mote just stirring in the slant of morning light across your kitchen table,
Talking to my mother Read More »