Issue 81

Sometimes, I miss the Aramaic of youth. Then, the personal flame came over us and we spoke to the numb nations— until the nations winnowed and muted us, but not breaking the spirit of our speech. Now, I live in the breeze’s murmur, the native tongues to which the soul responds, a language that comforts…

sphere of pillowed sky one faceless gathering of blue shyly, I want to sit by you but don’t old globe come home a blue-soft let near the cheek dozer, I’m tethered, and devoted to your raw and lonely bloom my lavish need to drink your world of crowded cups to fill.

From my car I watched with dread the woman who had raged at the meeting, condemned us all, heading toward the car I’d nicked on the way in. My daughter hiding in the back, “I’m scared” coming from the balled-up shape of her. Trembling a bit myself, I got out of my car as the…

From the Janus view of the Janiculum,                      a warren of restricted views. To one’s left, the Vatican. Across the river, the Jewish Ghetto                      created by an edict of a pope, “Since it is absurd and utterly…

If you come to this cold bowl with ladle in the moonlight and wish to strip the old self away, on a raw, clear night, some time go out alone, toward the end of the year, on a solitary road, limned by igneous fires, lit micas of snow, until you reach a pasture of cattle…

THROUGH A WARMING NIGHT the ice dams on the Big Slough thawed, and in the morning the first robins, antic in their hunt for worms, hopped in the south yard. Freddie Cahill’s spirit, dormant through what had seemed the longest winter of the eighty-some she’d spent on earth, stirred once again to meet the season’s…

Like an old Victrola, its needle stuck   In the groove where the flamenco dancer Patters her firecracker feet to the floor,   Machine gun maracas, so the cicada Pays homage to its clattery muse,   She who pitied the flight of Tithonus Withering eternally through his dog days,   So the myth tells us,…

Coming into the kingdom I was like a man grown old in banishment, a creature of hearsay and habit, prayerless, porous, a survivor of myself. Coming into the kingdom I was like a man stealing into freedom when the tyrant dies, if freedom is freedom where there are no eyes to obstruct it, if the…

[John] Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment is a variation on the classic (but not classical) two-slit experiment, which demonstrates the schizophrenic nature of quantum phenomena…. In the delayed-choice experiment, the experimenter decides whether to leave both slits open or to close one off after the electrons have already passed through the barrier—with the same results. The electrons…

I tell you it’s a bitch existence some Sundays and it’s no good pretending you don’t have to pretend, don’t have to hitch up those gluefutured nags Hope and Help and whip the sorry chariot of yourself toward whatever hell your heaven is on days like these. I tell you it takes some hunger heaven…