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My Life As Giselle

Giselle didn’t get up and leave when people started talking about the war. She stayed in the conversation, switched to waving her hands in front of other people’s faces instead of her own. When she listened in on the next table, she leaned over and said Pardonnez-moi before offering a pithy rejoinder to something she’d overheard. These talks were possible because people all around her were thinking, she was thinking, it was understood that everyone was thinking, that everyone should think.

Selected Poems

Tonight the trees bend over like broken / old women picking up their husbands’ / empty whiskey bottles.

— from “Drunk Again, I Stumble Home On Euclid And Cut Across Thornden Park Baseball Field”

Fifty Guilders

I sat by myself on the train from Copenhagen. In the middle of the night, the door to my compartment opened. A young woman wearing a ponytail, a T-shirt, and a dark blue suit eyed me stretched out on the seat, my gray hair curled over my collar. Then she decided to come in. She heaved her baggage into the overhead rack, shut the door, and stretched out on the opposite seat.

Pedestrian Dreams

On The Virtues Of Walking

I’m a native New Yorker. I was born in Greenwich Village and raised in Brooklyn. I don’t live in New York now, but I still work there, and I consider it my goddamned right to go anywhere I want in the city. I’ve got to watch out — if a place looks dangerous, or people look dangerous, then I’m going to steer clear. But not on principle.

Minding The Equipment

It is interesting enough, you might suppose, that a man goes out every winter, in the very worst of the Northwest weather, and lives out there alone for months at a time, all to take care of someone else’s heavy equipment.

Finding Out About Your Heart

After twenty-five years in the courtroom, you only have to look at the foreman to know a jury’s mind. The doc’s expression tells you what he has found out about your heart.

Born Too Young: Diary Of A Pilgrimage

(Part Three)

I don’t feel a thrill of nationalism here, like Dad does. He thinks, wow, a country full of Jews. I think, oh no, a country full of Israelis — another language I don’t understand.

Waitress Wisdom!

Giving Away Gardens

A Crip gang member approached the woman for whom I was building a vegetable garden — an old woman on welfare, an ex-prostitute, ex-waitress, ex-chicken-butchering plant worker. He said he was tired, pimping was hard work.

Doors