That autumn I lived in l’Hotel de la Petite Fleur in the old part of Nice, la Vielle Ville. The room, four flights up a narrow winding staircase built during the Inquisition. The walls a light brown Italian plaster. Walking through the ancient streets to the sun crested blue promenade past a noisy market. A
My head is filled with drowsiness, and my eyes are droopy the way an old woman draws a shade in her house that is broken because she is too old to fix it, but she wants to and she resents that shade just a little bit because it doesn’t quite meet her expectations, and that
Go walk in the tall grass of a farmer’s field you may feel strongly the absence of the bison all his gruff rolling muscle and tough horn, and wonder where the puma has gone the night is missing her angry yowling, the ground the stamp of her large, rough paws The black bear and the
All those beautiful women in their twenties with their naked, supple bodies, incredible pre-sagging, pre-kids breasts, buns, still firm and shapely, and well-muscled thighs wrapped around my waist, as I carried them to bed. Could that be the cause 30 years later of this excruciating back pain that’s laid me out for nearly 3 days?
Me, the dumbest sentimentalist of all times. Today I’ve been thinking on that run-down apartment house my grandma lived in near downtown decades ago. Been razed for years, but today that musty smell in the hallway came back to me. Is there even one other who remembers that? And the dents my grandma put in
In the psyche ward’s cafeteria, she sits, barely picking at her food. Her brow, wrinkled like a hieroglyph, meaning unbelievable suffering. Cutters, schizos, manics, substance abusers form a rag-tag choir. . Belt out an off-key “Happy Birthday to you” to someone they don’t even know. My eyes flit from face to face. Whatever private hells
Weekends in Connecticut, chipper didacts, trust fund babies, who live in cities but write of “nature,” not as anyone who knows it sees it, but as a kind of gentrified ecosystem. Survival of the cutesy! Woe to those poets of easy comfort! May they wander for 4 times 10 years, taking circuitous routes among quiet
Saturday nights the old folks scrub the dirt from under their nails, as best they can, wear dress comfortable shoes, go dance, go to St. Hedwig or Liederkranz Hall, go to talk crops and rain, go to drink beer— beer barreled belly farmers and their wives in clean starched cotton dresses like lampshades glowing on
