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;

In 1936, a child in Hitler’s Germany, what did I know about the war in… Andalusia was a tango on a wind-up gramophone,

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…

Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you, when I might ha… alive with anyone under the sun, when I might have been Abelard’s… or the whore of a Renaissance pope

The laughter of women sets fire to the Halls of Injustice and the false evidence burns to a beautiful white lightness It rattles the Chambers of Congre…

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

Such insignificance: a glance at your record on the doctor’s des… or a letter not meant for you. How could you have known? It’s no… that your life passes before you

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…

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,

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.

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…

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

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…

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

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…