Two teachers, Dave and Jane, are talking in a high school lounge.

The Book of Kells, in Trinity College, Dublin.

With Rabih Alameddine, Elizabeth Bowen, ² Mary-Beth Hughes, Samantha Hunt, Peter Orner, Natasha Randall, Marisa Silver, and Corinna Vallianatos

One spring, after being gone seven years, the actress Joan Gower returned to Grouse County to get her son and take him back to California to live with her.

He was big, but fragile.

It was the night Dirch Passer the comedian died.

A friend of mine describes certain cities as being full—too much has happened there, you cannot move. Paris, he says, is the quintessentially full city. I suspect he'd say Harlem is another place that is too full.

Sometimes love hits you like a drunk driver on Memorial Day weekend. A tragedy, really, but you don't care because you're the victim and beyond hope anyway.

Relics of Desire

Mostly you just disappear.

The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liar

Lord, jump from the elder tree, / let your feet and eyes flutter.

One country starts out as a bank / and ends up as a solarium.

They’ll grow thin anyway

Imagine a glass of water, a drop of blood sus- / pended—dead center—one drop, watch it / dissolve.

Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as / “In a retired vale... a sequestered grove”

At once an utterance and then a song for / direction established like a compass magnet / to history’s repetitive north.

Or regality is the reigning / indemnity, this thread, as a silk strand / augments the meadow with its redness

Marcel Proust plans a party while Gabriel-Louis Pringué reminisces about parties attended by Proust.

By high school I had a composition teacher, an ensemble teacher, a theory teacher, and a studio teacher, but what I really needed was a psychiatrist.

If you set aside love and friendship and the bonds of family, luck, religion, spirituality, the desire to better mankind, and music, and the arts, and obtaining food by hunting and fishing and farming, self-importance, so-called glory, and public and private transportation from buses to bicycles, if you set all that aside, money is what makes the world go around.

I’ve been trying, for more than six years, to write an essay or story or something about Eadweard Muybridge.