Browse Topics

Lion

For fifteen years I hadn’t seen a mountain lion, and then I’d dreamed of a big cat and seen one within a six-week period. The synchronicity brought my inner and outer worlds together with such force it left me tingling for hours. All day long, I turned over and over in my mind the image of the cat, the memory of my dream, and the resonance between the two. I felt certain that this mountain lion had come to make real the image in the dream, to bring the symbol to life.

Everything I Ever Wanted

Reflections On Sex At Midlife

When I was young, I dreamed of meeting a woman in a small, secluded room cut off from the rest of the world, someplace where my acts had no consequences. She wasn’t necessarily someone I knew; our lives didn’t touch.

Silas

Silas works at a social-service agency. He sits inside a cubicle, behind a metal desk with a simulated-wood surface. One by one, people — mostly old women, but some old men, too — come and sit on a metal folding chair across the desk from Silas, where they weep and whine and struggle to maintain their dignity and finally grow vexed and demand their Social Security checks.

Selected Stories

I went to a theater to see a play. In the middle of the second act, there was a pause. The actors seemed to be waiting for something. A tall man walked up to me and whispered, “You’re in the play.”

Luck Disguised As Ordinary Life

On the way back to the hotel, Martina whispered in a conspiratorial tone that her friend Carlos Castaneda was coming to join us for tea. “Don’t tell anyone. It’s just for us. He’s a bit finicky about who he hangs out with.”

Selected Poems

Even the page says, / Don’t spill that ink / on this unspoiled white. / Your scribbles are / so broken, your words / so bald, so patent, / they reveal your / mediocrity.

—from “Hierophant”

The Break

I don’t sleep. My head’s a bunch of clacking pool balls, worrying around about things. That’s why I hear Mrs. Patterson tiptoe into my room. I can see from the hall light it’s her: she’s wearing her hospital gown, her red high heels, red kid gloves, and matching purse.

Orson And Me

And now I know that He wants me to try to write a book again and that this time I’ll succeed.

Hibernating

It was bear shit, suddenly familiar and evocative. A pile lay steaming on the doorstep of a boarded-up hotel. I felt hot iron in my legs and pretended to fumble for something in my pocket as I crouched in the doorway and inhaled deeply.

March 1995

Just A Moment

The past rushes into the room, breathless, dressed in something outrageous she just threw together.