All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
Category Archives: Fiction
Excerpt from Southland – Nina Revoyr
Although in the end the police weren’t involved, Alma still felt no relief. It was the principal who called, informing her that Curtis had been implicated in the mess at the junior high school. A kind of man who’d supported her own teaching application at Carver five years earlier, he sounded apologetic about the news: someone had broken in through a classroom window at Audubon, and had gone around spray-painting graffiti on the lockers and doors. It wasn’t gang-related; it was more childish fare:
“Mr. Adams is a stupid fuckhead” and “Mr. Doolan likes to touch girls booties.” But the school had called the police in , and between the school officials and two officers from Southwest, they had questioned a hundred students. Finally, someone said they’d heard a couple of boys bragging, and three eighth-graders–Tyrone Cooper, Jason Buford, and Curtis Martindale–were fingered for the crime.
It was clear right off that Curtis wasn’t one of the main perpetrators. he’d just tagged along, both the other boys said; he hadn’t broken any glass and had only used the spray can once. But that was far too much for Alma. As she and Curtis drove out of the school parking lot the day they met with the principal, she saw the two cops watching from their squad car. Although they’d been called in to help with the questioning, they were not asked to make the arrests, because the school had declined to press charges and had opted to punish the boys itself. Now, the cops stared at Curtis from the window of their car, angry at being denied the quarry they’d been summoned to flush.
And Alma was nervous–because of her son’s flirtation with the law, but also because of the start of the larger romance it might imply.
“The Blue Terrance” – Terrance Hayes
I come from a long line hollowed out on a dry night,
the first son in a line of someone else’s children,
afraid of water, closets, other people’s weapons,
hunger and stupidity, afraid of the elderly and the new dead,
bodies tanned by lightening, afraid of dogs with ethos,
each white fang on the long walk home. I believe all the stories
of who I was: a hardback book, a tent behind the house
of a grandmother who was not my grandmother, the smell of beer,
which is a smell like sweat. They say I climbed to the roof
with a box of light bulbs beneath my arm. Before the bricks,
there were trees, before the trees, there were lovers
barely rooted to the field, but let’s not talk about them,
it makes me blue. I come from boys throwing rocks
bigger than their fists at the head of the burned girl,
her white legs webbed as lace on a doily. In someone’s garage
there was a flashlight on two dogs pinched in heat.
And later, a few of the puppies born dead and too small
to be missed. I come from howls sent up all night and all day,
summers below the hoop and board nailed to a pine tree.
I come from light bulbs glowing with no light and no expressions,
thrown as far as the will allows like a night chore, like a god
changing his mind; from the light broken on the black road
leading to my mother. Tell me what you remember of her
now that her walk is old, now that the bone in her hip strains
to heal its fracture? I come from the hot season
gathering its things and leaving. I come from the dirt road
leading to the paved one. I will not return to the earth
as if I had never been born. I will not wait to become a bird
dark enough to bury itself in midair. I wake up sometimes
in the middle of the country with fur on my neck.
Where did they bury my dog after she hung herself,
and into the roots of what tree are those bones entangled?
I come blessed like a river of black rock, like a long secret,
and the kind of kindness like a door that is closed
but not locked. Yesterday I was nothing but a road
heading four ways. When I threatened to runaway
my mother said she would take me where ever I wanted to go.
Excerpt from “The Boy Who Lived” – JK Rowling
Mr. Dursley stood rooted to the spot. He had been hugged by a complete stranger. He also thought he had been called a Muggle, whatever that was. He was rattled. He hurried to his car and set off for home, hoping he was imagining things, which he had never hoped before, because he didn’t approve of imagination.
Excerpt from Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The twins returned home a short time before three, urgently summoned by their mother. They found Angela Vicario lying face down on the dining room couch, her face all bruised, but she’d stopped crying. “I was no longer frightened,” she told me. “On the contrary: I felt as if the drowsiness of death had finally been lifted from me, and the only thing I wanted was for it all to be over quickly so I could flop down and go to sleep.” Pedro Vicario, the more forceful of the brothers, picked her up by the waist and sat her on the dining room table.
“All right, girl,” he said to her, trembling with rage, “tell us who it was.”
She only took the time necessary to say the name. She looked for it in the shadows, she found it at first sight among the many, many easily confused names from this world and the other, and she nailed it to the wall with her well-aimed dart, like a butterfly with no will whose sentence has always been written.
“Santiago Nasar,” she said.
–Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa
Sad Catastrophe – F. Scott Fitzgerald
We don’t want visitors, we said:
They come and sit for hours;
They come when we have gone to bed;
They are imprisoned here by showers;
They come when they are low and bored–
Drink from the bottle of your heart.
Once it is emptied, the gay horde,
Shouting the Rubaiyat, depart.
I balked: I was at work, I cried;
Appeared unshaven or not at all;
Was out of gin: the cook had died
Of small-pox–and more tales as tall.
On boor and friend I turned the same
Dull eye, the same impatient tone–
The ones with beauty, sense and fame
Perceived we wished to be alone.
But dull folk, dreary ones and rude–
Long talker, lonely soul and quack–
Who hereto hadn’t dare intrude,
Found us alone, swarmed to attack,
Thought silence was attention; rage
An echo of their own home’s war–
Glad we had ceased to “be upstage.”
–But the nice people came no more.
From On Booze
“Entropy” – Miller Williams
You say Hello and part of what you spend to say it goes to God.
There is a tax on all our simplest thoughts and common acts.
It will come to pass that a friend greets friend and there is not a sound.
Thus God subtracts bit by little bit till in the end there is nothing at all. Intend. Intend.
Excerpt from The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury
I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. I’ve always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you’ve died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that’s a lot of corpses, each dead in a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don’t know or understand or want to understand.
—No Particular Night or Morning
Excerpt from Taoism: The Way of the Tao
Detach from Learning and You Have No Worries
Detach from learning and you have no worries.
How far apart are yes and yeah?
How far apart are good and bad?
The things people fear cannot but be feared.
Wild indeed the uncentered!
Most people celebrate
as if they were barbecueing a slaughtered cow,
or taking in the springtime vistas;
I alone am aloof,
showing no sign,
like an infant that doesn’t yet smile,
riding buoyantly
as if with nowhere to go.
Excerpt from To a God Unknown – John Steinbeck
Joseph’s horse raised its head and sniffed the air. On top of the ridge stood a clump of giant madrone trees, and Joseph saw with wonder how nearly they resembled meat and muscles. They thrust up muscular limbs as red as flayed flesh and twisted like bodies on the rack. Joseph laid his hand on one of the branches as he rode by, and it was cold and sleek and hard. But the leaves at the ends of the horrible limbs were bright green and shiny. Pitiless and terrible trees, the madrones. They cried with pain when burned.
Joseph gained the ridge-top and looked down on the grass lands of his new homestead where the wild oats moved in silver waves under a little wind, where the patches of blue lupins lay like shadows in a clear lucent night, and the poppies on the side hills were broad rays of sun. He drew up to look at the long grassy meadows in which clumps of live oaks stood like perpetual senates ruling over the land. The river with its mask of trees cut a twisting path down through the valley. Two miles away he could see, beside a gigantic lonely oak, the white speck of his tent pitched and left while he went to record his homestead. A long time he sat there. As he looked into the valley, Joseph felt his body flushing with a hot fluid of love. “This is mine,” he said simply, and his eyes sparkled with tears and his brain was filled with wonder that this should be his. There was pity in him for the grass and the flowers; he felt that the trees were his children and the land his child. For a moment he seemed to float high in the air and to look down upon it. “It’s mine,” he said again, “and I must take care of it.”
drunken library 