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Aging
March 2010
Soon I’ll celebrate another birthday. It’s too bad the earth doesn’t have a real birthday. It might remind us that the planet had a beginning and — as it circles a medium-sized star whose days are numbered, too — is moving inexorably toward its end.
March 2010Turning Fifty
It was a beautiful day, rainy-gray, foggy, dismal, perfect. / I was so happy because there was nothing to do / and nowhere to go and no one to meet, and never / in my life had I felt so empty and so full.
March 2010hank
hank fell stepping off an escalator at rockefeller center and banged his head up good/ spent the next ten days in roosevelt hospital/ crankily submitting to every test
February 2010December 2009
You’d think someone as productive as I am could learn how to stop worrying and be happy. But the black dogs of depression keep nipping at my heels. Women haven’t cured me. Sigmund Freud hasn’t cured me. Nor have all the self-help books I’ve read, or the legal and illegal drugs I’ve ingested, or the spiritual big shots I’ve met who’ve told me God is right over there; no, a little to the left; now back up a step; you forgot to say, “May I?”
December 2009My Father’s Torso
It first appears in the guest-bath mirror, / beheaded and one arm missing / due to the angle I have of him / getting ready for his appointment.
November 2009excerpted from
Knulp
After a period of cold fog had given way to sunny days brightened by late bluebells and cool, ripe blackberries, the winter suddenly set in. First, three days of bitter cold; then, as the cold abated, a fast, heavy snowfall.
May 2009At Her Feet
The door to my mother’s apartment at the assisted-living facility is unlocked, so I enter. The Steinway, silent and black, takes up most of the living room. In the second bedroom — where she keeps her electric piano, painting supplies, and a daybed — the radio plays classical music. It’s nine in the morning, and the blinds have not yet been raised, but there’s light enough for me to see my mother lying on her side on the daybed in her ruby-colored robe.
May 2008
September 2007
When I try too hard to get my life into order, I forget the order that gives rise to this life — an order born of mystery, but an order nonetheless.
September 2007Consumer Report
Consider this a kind of consumer report. I am not a car gal. I have little interest in vehicles, and the ones that I have owned I’ve driven until their grisly deaths: burst gas lines, generator poof-outs, whole-engine cardiac arrests requiring that the massive mechanical muscle be lifted from the steel cavity and dropped onto a junkyard heap. It is easier, by the way, to dispose of a dead body than a dead car.
August 2007
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