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Siren’s Song

Solitude seems possible; the sea and sky are wedged into the cove by two walls of volcanic rock. The horizon is broken only by an occasional sail.

Lipstick

Cherries In The Snow, Plush Purple, Orange Flip

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.

June 1992

The Map I Was Promised

Things I didn’t get to last week: answering the mail, giving up coffee, saving the planet.

Mother

Having to choose, clutching a doll, finding it hard to say goodbye

Notes From The Closet

I’m also a fag. Which means that I regard my accomplishments and abilities and virtues with considerable irony. Not because I think any less of myself in the abstract, but because I know how little my accomplishments and abilities and virtues protect me from self-doubt.

Trying To Remember

What Marvin Knows

Marvin had been watching the car, a red Ford Escort, drive by his house for perhaps twenty minutes. It was driven by a young fellow, probably one of the local college students.

Toshi

I hospitalized an obsessive-compulsive depressive who had been trying to kill himself for four years. Fifty times he’d removed his head from the noose to check the lock on the door, change the color of his socks, tie a better knot.

Tumbleweed

A thousand stars, a billion. Thundering silence. It’s Tom who reaches over. He puts his hand on my chest and says, “I wish we had more grass,” and leaves it there. Till I curl up beside him.