As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.
The heron is painted a somber Madonna blue, my only criticism of it. Turquoise would have been my choice, I tell him. Turquoise is what that blue would look like if she divorced the night and went on...
I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water. Her courage. In the cave I think she must have le...
Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gaugin...
But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.
But I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water.
Just the word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that's got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math.
You had to really cultivate an ending. To get it to last, you had to kneel and tend to the burial ground, continuously firming your resolution.
They greyhound whine with her, distressed by her distress. Sometimes, in a traitorous fugue, the dog forgot to be unhappy and ran off to chase purple butterflies or murder shrew-mice, or to piss a joy...
Many of the presidents have sworn themselves in to similarly foolish titles: Governor of Cow Pastures, Commanding General of Standing Chickens.
How true can this sensation of unity really be if you need to leave everyone you care about to get it.
He was intelligent and healthy, but decent to a point that crippled him as a master of his home or an accumulator of wealth. Madelaine had once characterized him as standing on the edge of the mainstr...
For the duration of our friendship, we'd trade off roles like this: anchor and boat, beholder and beheld.
Dracula shows his fangs, and the Okie flees through a cornfield. Cornstalks smack her face. Help! she screams to a sky full of crows. He's not actually from Europe!
Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal.
A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monoga...
Turn the lights of please, Ava, she whispered, and I remember her breath hot and rummy on our cheeks. To this day I think of rum as a marine smell; the scent of it on an adult's breath turned the worl...
Later I had to raise the baby rats she ate, and why I thought one creature was my beloved pet while the other creatures were food is still a mystery to me. That was my first clue that love can warp a...
Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn’t you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school....
Blah!' Oglivy yells, pushing Emma and me into a pile of wet leaves. We roll around, a red flail of limbs and hysterical laughter. We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, und...