Browse Topics

Dance Lessons

My parents were dancers. Though practical and predictable in all else, they let their passions surface in the rumba, the tango, the dances that conjured up exotic places and smoldering emotions.

Their Turn

To the melancholy wailing of a Turkish flute, the dervishes enter the stage dressed in long black coats and tall woolen hats. It’s a dramatic moment even if you haven’t done your homework.

December 1994

Table Manners

The full-page ads by big corporations proclaim peace on earth, when all they really want is another piece of the earth.

The Dream Jar

Eugene brought me here to the Barstow County Hospital night before last, and I would like to take this opportunity right now to thank all the doctors and nurses who have been so kind to me while I’ve been here, even though they know I am a murderer.

Waiting For Emma

In fact, we’ve always been positive about having another child. We both imagine a daughter: Emma, a real fireball, definite in her opinions and politically precocious. I can even see the birth announcement. It says, “Announcing . . .” in bold type on the cover, then opens up to a color xerox of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People — that painting of a woman who’s marching over the barricades, one breast bared, with a fearless young kid waving his pistols and a dying old man looking up at her in wonder. I know that sounds odd for a card introducing a newborn, but that’s what I see: woman warrior.

Shrink

You asked me to write to let you know how I’ve been doing. You suggested I might start, like we used to, with a dream. Well, it’s funny; ever since you asked me to write, I’ve been haunted by a really old dream — maybe twenty years old.

An Inventory Of Timelessness

What I’m saying is that we in the late twentieth century live not in a city or country, not on a planet, but in a collective dream. Our everyday world is one of dreamlike instantaneous changes, unpredictable metamorphoses, random violence, archetypal sex, and a threatening sense of multiple meaning.

Ceremony At Chews Ridge

We gathered in the Round House, a covered amphitheater dug into a hill, and sat on earthen benches. Four huge tree trunks in the middle of the room supported the wooden beams of the roof, which, like a tepee, was open in the center to the sky. Beneath the opening burned a large ceremonial fire.

Sunbeams

Skilled labor teaches something not to be found in books or in colleges.

Harriet Robinson

Attics

Ninety clear glass marbles, a suicide note, a deathbed confession