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Death
June 2010
Just give me the good news this morning, and let me hear it sung! I want glorious cantatas. I want soaring arias. I want the music of the spheres ringing in my ears.
June 2010excerpted from
Dombey And Son
“What is money after all?” said Mr. Dombey, backing his chair a little, that he might the better gaze in sheer amazement at the presumptuous atom that propounded such an inquiry.
June 2010Love And Death In Paris And London
We hear so much about the romance of travel, but nothing beats romance while traveling. I’d found it on a number of occassions, sometimes in the strangest of circumstances: while monitoring election results in El Salvador or staying in a dismal youth hostel during a rain-besotted Irish winter. If I could find love there, why not in Paris in the spring?
June 2010
Three Days Before My Mother’s Birthday
I run into a young woman almost staggering across / the street. I’m surprised to see it’s someone I / know. She seems pale.
May 2010
Submit To Mother India
“Submit to Mother India,” a veteran traveler advised me before I left New York, and I intended to take her advice to heart. I steeled myself for nothing to go according to plan. I was prepared to get gruesomely ill at some point. I was prepared to let India have its way with me. “You can’t prepare yourself for India,” my well-traveled friend had also said.
April 2010
20, 40, 60, 80
I readily confess: I do not relish aging. As I close in on the age of sixty, I can’t understand how life’s waters, pure and rushing, have so mysteriously carried me here; how the moon keeps on with its rhythms and the sun rises and falls and the days pass faster and faster as I use up my allotment of breaths and move toward death.
April 2010
Sparrow
What could the Bible mean / when it says no sparrow falls / without God’s notice?
January 2010Scars And Scales
The moon casts a pearl-colored path, and I, ducking into shadows, carry a platter of beef roast, so raw I can smell the blood, to the edge of the backyard swimming pool. Already Dad has reached the shallow end, and my younger twin brothers, Michelangelo and Leonardo — my mother had a passion for art — are not far behind. I coo to them; their tails move from side to side in anticipation.
January 2010
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