The morning of Claire's funeral, I lie naked on the table and wait for her mourners to arrive. Thomas scrapes a knife against whetstone in the kitchen. When he appears above me, the blade glints harsh in his hand. It's all I can see. To minimize the pain, he explains with a paternal smile. I smile too.
Was that season artery or vein? when the days stretched like Broadway, & the nights undid our shirts – the temperature so slight you could raise your arms in flight & feel nothing, the body as air. But there was also the need for hurt. And dusk: a ghost of a boy tempted to feel his weight, to put his palm to the depth, touch the pupil, the dead turbine of god’s one good cataracted eye.
It was six o'clock in the morning when I started collecting clocks, and now it's 9:37. 10:37. I mean it's 10:00cm. These clocks are all wrong. Time is spilling out of them and getting everything. . . getting everything. . . that word when the clothes are on the floor and crumbs are in your bed and you've spilled wine and yelled at George.
St. Christopher strides across the river. Both hands grip a walking staff bracing him against the current, his calf muscles flexing as fish swirl about his legs. He is looking up at the infant Christ perched birdlike on his right shoulder. This is perhaps the moment in which the Saint, who does not yet know the identity of the child, is said to ask Him, “Why are you so heavy?” and Christ answers, “Because I bear on my shoulders the weight of the world.”
Two sides of what used to be one wooden box hang on the walls of the Smart Gallery in Chicago. At first glance they are unremarkable: vaguely Italian-looking landscapes populated by two vaguely Italian-looking lovers, all flowing hair and slit silk. In the panel on the left, a woman lies improbably across some rocky ground—perhaps sleeping or dead—while a man leans on his staff and peers over her with a neutral expression. In the panel on the right, in front of a section of silvery sea, the same woman stands apart from the man who reaches toward her. His mouth is open. Her hands cross upwards into two woody stems and blossom into the unmistakable broccoli-floret silhouette of a tree: Daphne, turning into a laurel to escape the god Apollo.
On the day I was born, the air was a supple stew—heavy with overripe fruit and armpits, ocean salt, and slow-roasted goat meat. Of course, I don’t remember that day, but I was born in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam—just ‘Dar’ to the locals—and the viscosity of the air is the first thing that visitors remark on. It is what they remember most.