1992 1) I was born in a Free City, nea… 2) In the year of my birth, money… confetti. A loaf of bread cost a m… course I do not remember this.

For Lucy, who called them “ghost… Someone was always leaving and never coming back. The wooden houses wait like old wi… along this road; they are everywhe…

Who is that man in black, walking away from us into the distance? The painter, they say, took a long… finding his vision of the world. The mermaids, if that is what they…

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs

Sometimes, when the light strikes… and pulls you back into childhood and you are passing a crumbling ma… completely hidden behind old willo… or an empty convent guarded by hem…

Jenny, your mind commands kingdoms of black and white: you shoulder the crow on your left… the snowbird on your right; for you the cinders part

Our trees are aspens, but people mistake them for birches; they think of us as characters in a Russian novel, Kitty and Lev… living contentedly in the country.

If an inaudible whistle blown between our lips can send him home to us, then silence is perhaps the sound of spiders breathing

You have read War and Peace. Now here is Sister Carrie, not up to Tolstoy; still it will second the real world: predictable planes and levels,

Doctor, you say there are no haloe… around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my…

When the moon was full they came t… some with pitchforks, some with ra… some with sieves and ladles, and one with a silver cup. And they fished til a traveler pas…

For Linda Foster Because we used to have leaves and on damp days our muscles feel a tug, painful now, from when roots

The moon lies on the river like a drop of oil. The children come to the banks to… of their wounds and bruises. The fathers who gave them their wo…

This is not fantasy, this is our l… We are the characters who have invaded the moon, who cannot stop their computers. We are the gods who can unmake

I. Insomnia The bulb at the front door burns a… If it were a white rose it would t… through another endless night. The moon knows the routine;