On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial deja vu,...
I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulate than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in the 'The Spiritist's Telegraph.' Mothers burning inside the risen suns of thei...
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...
Her name in a stranger's mouth was a resurrection; however briefly, she was alive with him again again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb.
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...
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!
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...
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...
How true can this sensation of unity really be if you need to leave everyone you care about to get it.
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...
For the duration of our friendship, we'd trade off roles like this: anchor and boat, beholder and beheld.
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.
Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal.
An unembarrassed silence seemed to be on loan to us from the distant future, where we were already friends.
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.
I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.
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...
Many of the presidents have sworn themselves in to similarly foolish titles: Governor of Cow Pastures, Commanding General of Standing Chickens.
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...