Issue 70

We frequent the one where there will be the auctioneer who is predisposed toward hats, who is wearing a red fez tonight while I am not bidding on the stuffed mink cemented to a wooden board, or the colorful antique lard can. I never buy anything except nachos in the back which is when the…

To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer’s home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word. —John Szarkowski, Introduction to William Eggleston’s Guide I’m sure I’m wrong about him, but it’s always seemed like slumming to me, those _____lovely color photographs—quickly seen shots of broken grave monuments…

And who looks like his passport photo, may I ask? The man often lost his cool at immigration counters and customs and wherever documents met metaphors of the frailty of life. Look carefully, officer, behold what a little less beard has done for youthfulness overflowing from a face no torment could mar? Yes, I see,…

Embarrassed by the awe he felt as a boy touching a mimosa shut along the vein, tiny leaves blinking into supplicant palms, the man came to understand that astonishment. Beyond vegetable with a reflex— didn’t venus flytrap also clamp, and don’t sunflowers turn?— he grasped the aesthetics of mimosa’s fruitless act, effect which refused its…

for Murray Baumgarten At night, under wraps, often none too soon, the ghetto gave up what it must—bodies rowed in silence across the long lagoon. Bora winds scattered dust on canvas shrouds intended to disguise Venetian Jews as freighted cargos—to ward off spit and stones. Dust and water, all the ablution Venice would bestow, faceless…

Angels prod seven naked sinners chained together by their crimes. Pigeons mock them with excrement and the flapping of wings while God broods, impassive on his throne. From the marble portico, all gape down as demons stir a vat of the damned and season it with another soul, there on the cathedral’s storybook façade. From…

for Robin Needham, killed in the 2004 Christmas tsunami Something shuddered in the un- fathomable dark, and a wave shouldered forth like an eighteen wheeler skidding sideways into oncoming traffic—a wave, beautiful as snow on a navy sleeve inhering by the power of a word, the word that shuddered in each dark cell of the…

Even at escape velocity, we move so slowly, and having escaped, we walk, run if it suits the moment, always return to walk, a chair, a bed. So slowly, whether on a park trail or a space station treadmill or from the room having kissed a child goodnight. We cannot outpace the sun or moon,…

Sudden summer rain, warm on your back _____like asperges slashes, more of a blessing than anything to get dolloped in the eye and laugh away _____the shame of believing in any kind of redemptive wash to get to the glass door before the stroup of sky _____spills, to be the chaplain carrying in the far…

It is hard to be misunderstood. And how many of us get vindication after a century or so? I mistook the little bloodsucker for a wad of gauze as it whirled from the sailor’s spliced thumb. It became an iridescent helix, a liquid amber’s leaf dangling through a day-long spring and fall and spring, Have…