I am standing with my niece in front of my father’s bureau, and I show her the gold-plated watch with the “Hamilton” typed out across its face. My father loved pocket watches and there are a couple of them still sitting on his bureau so it takes me a moment to find the right one. The watch I select is …
Snow I wake, and think so this is how it comes, no thunder, wind, or windstorm’s violence to rend our lower nature, only a presence. Outlines are familiar: light was present yesterday. Without event the miracle is here. Given the day, let crystal loose on me, to see beyond the accident of snow, this brilliance touched with rose. @ …
I stand by the bed. The fingers of your hand are loose and warm, and though your eyes are closed your head is toward me. Are you sleeping, in the country you have got to? On pathways of the blood you have withdrawn, walking younger with each step. The scene is in neutral tones, subdued as it is in dreams, …
I wake up in the same bed I slept in as a boy, in a house Sylvia Plath once likened to a walnut. If I went back in time to the days I shared the room with my brother, the room would look almost exactly the way it does now. There is not a single door in my parents’ house …
Every summer for the past 25 years, my wife and I have gone up to Cape Cod to spend a week with my family. The family used to cram itself into a three or four bedroom house my eldest sister rented in Orleans. As the family got larger with more in-laws and kids, we moved to a nine bedroom …