Remember that
you were once golden
standing tall with dignity.
Now the gold has darkened to sepia
and dignity is dying.
Soon the rivers will be
running with dead fish again.
Down at your feet,
a bumblebee struggles to keep aloft;
It was a swift and menacing time.
One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy.
Things were leaving one place and showing up in another.
It was springtime when I arrived, an east wind blowing,
an uncanny wind as it turned out.
The girl remained on Fender’s mind for the rest of the week. Every time a customer, dark-eyed and caffeine deprived, shuffled in from the late winter darkness, carrying the scent of the dying season– dirty snow piles and stale road salt– a new question was planted in his head.
Despite the train racing toward Philadelphia, everything came to a halt for Alan. She made him feel twenty again. Her presence was intoxicating and confusing. What was he supposed to do with this surprise admiration?
"I can't help you, little one." Jimmy tears up a little himself now with the baby quiet around his finger. "Everybody'd be asking what you doing with a little brand new baby, Jimmy. They'd think I'd done something wrong...
On the evening of the International Workers’ Day in 1976, after returning to the station from his daily patrols, Ming received an official form called “Rooting permanently in the countryside and becoming a lifelong revolutionary.”
I’m pretending to be you, Daddy. I’m biking to the meeting and I see an aquarium in someone’s trash and I think, I want that, so I get off my bike and hide the aquarium between two bushes and then I get back on the bike and go to the meeting.
The misdemeanors broke their rock all day. We felons pushed ours up the mountain of our crimes. And there at the summit the setting sun swallowed us. Even imagined prisoners need rest. The body has limits; bones obey the dark law.
My greatest legacy, the Sistine Chapel, would not have built without creative financing – nor would my nephew’s hiring of Michelangelo to paint the ceiling been possible – and given the tourists something to marvel over.
