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December 2000

We fell asleep the usual way, Norma curled against me, the cats between us at the foot of the bed. At three in the morning, she woke up, violently sick from something she’d eaten, and spent the next two hours throwing up. I knelt beside her in the bathroom, my arm around her shoulder. There are many positions for love.

All My Previous Poems

Over and over, / I have submitted poems / to this magazine. / Over and over, / the editor / has rejected them. / Finally, / he accepted / this poem.

— from “this poem”

Disguises

A black wig, four long red marks spaced like fingers, a black polyester shirt with white polka dots

Old Soul

How Aging Reveals Character — A Conversation With James Hillman

To show one’s face is part of having the courage to show who one is. And coming to terms with your own face takes a lifetime. Just think how, when you were twelve or sixteen, you wished you looked different. And that’s true for everyone; even the most perfect, beautiful boy or girl is dissatisfied. So why is that? It can’t just be that I don’t look like the model on the magazine cover. It’s something else. You haven’t yet accepted your fate, who you are. As you get older, that relationship between your face and who you are matures. They blend together. Your true self shows more.

Happiness

Ground zero, fuzzy kittens, the most beautiful roundhouse right punch

The Force Of The Face

Baby Face/Death Mask. Right away, at birth, the infant no sooner delivered, breathing, and bathed, its face is studied for clues to character. It looks so fierce, so wisely old, so placid, so much like “your” side of the family. . . . And, at the end, quiescent and struggle-free on the deathbed, they used to come with the plaster to make a death mask. The custom, begun almost five thousand years ago in Egypt, would capture the essence of character in the features of the face.

A New Life

Dressing Up

A kind of ecstatic Armageddon, a body cast, a love scene

Palm Sunday

Two days ago, I reduced myself to a sturdy hobble by learning to jump rope. Never in my youth did I jump rope. Where I come from, males did not even consider it, except behind the walls of gymnasiums, and then only with the ultimate goal of pummeling an opponent in mind. But I’m a long way from youth now, and, having become convinced of rope-jumping’s merits as exercise, I strode boldly into a toy store, bought a candy-striped, red-and-wheat-colored rope, and went home to use it.

Whispered Prayers

Photographs By Stephen R. Harrison

I did not know, for example, that in 1950 the Chinese government initiated a series of invasions that, within a decade, would result in the occupation of the whole of Tibet and the eventual death of more than 1.2 million Tibetans — about one-sixth of the total population — due to political persecution, imprisonment, torture, and famine.