I wear Ralph’s flannel shirt When making pizza dough, Flour dust on the cuff Yeasty smell, like damp spring Makes me think of the flowers, rising from his garden In a laughing riot and a booming greeting like May thunder every time I see him.
The chickens rise with the sun but do not venture into the uniform white – there is no more earth to scratch. The farmer’s breath is taken with the violent gust wrapping its arms around her, into her. Matted hair and flushed cheeks her face weeps without sadness. Or for the brilliance of the day: the muted voice of the land the afterthought of a tree on the horizon, weeping, too, against the north wind. As darkness befalls the hill snow-cover lightens the early dusk. Nebulae wink from a perfect crest above the barn to halt even the most self-absorbed. A moment too long in the cold just to look on beyond the boots and the frozen muck, up to the Greater.…
So there is this tree that I drive by every day that I leave the house. A long time ago, this tree grew up around this sharp-edged rock (Probably shale). As it grew, a corner of the rock became lodged in the trunk. And so, the rock was lifted up off the ground (about a foot). You can only see it when you are driving North and sometimes I will go seasons when I forget about it. But it stays with me, like an itch I can’t scratch. As if I could scrape off a scab of longing and ease some pain inside my heart by removing the rock from the tree and dropping it unceremoniously on the ground. I’m usually driving too fast…
Art and entertainment establishments often puzzle the generations that are far enough removed from the time when their works seemed in any way revolutionary. If we weren’t afraid to take swipes at established geniuses, we could say that Andy Warhol was no better than a graphic designer proficient in Photoshop, The Rolling Stones sounded like an average bar rock band with a croaky singer, Godard made films encompassing all the signposts of a precocious art film student, and e. e. cummings simply couldn’t figure out how to set the spacing on his typewriter. This is all very arguable, of course, and probably at least somewhat inaccurate – for full disclosure, I enjoy all of the above except Warhol, whose innovations I nevertheless recognize.…
Tea is too much trouble Like friends requiring Time and attention. Better to have those glad to see you Whenever they show up Than folks in need of Time and attention. Too much trouble is this tea As arranging Sapphic syllables Or brewing loose leaves green Better still your flip nattering And errant wallowing Than to swap auspices bearing Time and attention. Like these bags steeping of Too Much Trouble Tea. For Suzanne, Book Nook Volunteer @ Teton Library Jackson, WY
Already the sun has lapped the snowdrifts clean from the yard. Now it comes begging at the kitchen window, as though each pane were a sheet of ice or the glaze on a cake to celebrate the end of something. Winter, maybe. But the soil rests untilled, the seeds unplanted. I shield my eyes from the glare. It asks too much too soon: we are creatures of occasional darkness still in the lull of frosts. We hunger, but not for green. The cellar offers last year’s roots and the ghosts of leeks where one or two of Hades’ rivers cut through on their run to irrigate the cool, infertile bedrock. A month or two will split the garden, bounty…
A slow, rolling terror had me reaching for a Fino. Slowly, terroir tried its best to take the place of a Benzo. The half-life was too short; brine, adrenaline, made me cry out “Oloroso!” Having my fix, and wanting to mix, down went the Fino, and a Benzo! Oh no. And if I must (and I must) pick an agonist for intensification of the effects, Fo sho, Oloroso. Amber waves of ocean syrup, nuts, berries, grains, and tangs to which You can’t say no. And, now, Oloroso translates to “OH GOD, MY LEGS DON’T WORK” Dios mio, dios mio. Just sit for a bit and cast off your FitBit, you’re going to be here for a while as you know.
My friend has a habit of falling in love with fruit; mostly the tropical ones with thin skin that are heavy and soft and inherently warm he claims that they fit in his palm resting between the thumb and pinky along his life line like the curve of a woman’s hip or a heart naked, scared outside of its chest. He cradles them like eggs loving them giving them back the gentle roundness of their birth in the humid places of the earth that also make spines and venoms and biting things, and he eats them with a gratitude that is humbling to see. Except for this one cherimoya in which I think he recognized too much of himself so carried around…
1. You pinch, she says her knuckles punched in faces, cracked with work, breathing their sentence to me across the cold air, putting the knife in my new hand, it must be new it is shaking and then the crisp exact nature of the first cut– onions, blood. 2. You take on knowing the way of this, cloth licking ink, water, muscle linking nerve, heavy with a thin sharp edge and its motions the song that parts and pieces your minutes, hours, the deep hard heat of taking from the whole, first one leaf then another another another. 3. The days are some sleepless rotation, bitter black coffee, sly dirt dawns, cold one at a…
In the winter of 2005, I took a job as a research reporter for the New York Times Beijing bureau. The capital was blustery and bitter cold, coming off another long haul winter. A fresh round of yellow dust kicked up across the city. Each month the Times paid me 5000 yuan, or roughly $620 at the time. Rent was 2000 yuan. 3000 yuan left. One yuan would get me around on the buses. Three yuan bought a ride on the subway. Taxis were in the double digits, plus tip. Walking was free. But walking makes you hungry. So five yuan was enough to buy a full breakfast with soymilk. Twenty yuan, by contrast, was not enough to get a small latte. You plot…