Aging even as we speak
Edith and I were crossing Queens Boulevard a little behind Eva, so we got a good look at the back of her head, with its thinning purplish-brown hair. I said, “It’s time for Eva to stop dyeing her hair. It looks ridiculous.” Edith said, “You know Eva’s very vain and
Piazza delle Cinque Scole, 2017
The tiny restaurant Sora Margherita issues orders secretly to the piazza. She is to the piazza what Sam’s dog was to David Berkowitz. Now, she pretends indifference to the hail, as if she had nothing to do with it. She sits quietly, changing colors as she now does (last year
Sea-Lions
SEA-LIONS, WITH APOLOGIES TO THE ANIMALS, WHO ALSO NEED TO FIND THEMSELVES A NAME THAT REALLY SPEAKS TO THEM The waves told me what to call them. This in a moment of confidence, nobody around, and they were rushing up and whispering in those urgent white voices, showing their teeth and scribbling madly in sand, each one rewriting
Respect for Stones
I go out to court the stones in my courtyard. It seems only fair since I keep saying I spent quarantine with 40,000 friends. I mean, I go out to count the stones in my courtyard. As a sign of respect. Everything I learned I learned from stones. My
About Comparison
About Comparison. and To Keep Thinking Fresh, Keep Language Fresh The other day I read somewhere that each generation of abusive parent defends themselves against the notion that they are the same as their own abusive parent by not being abusive in the same way or to the same extent. “But I don’t
Seas, oceans, egg salad sandwiches
The sea is roaring like a lion. No, the sea is becoming a lion. No, “The sea is becoming an ocean, dude,” I say to nobody. It’s just her and me. Who else, on this Roman beach, really knows an ocean? We knew the ocean of Brooklyn. The spanking mothers who handed out egg-salad sandwiches, and told
Under the sign of Pothos
Eros has a sibling, a beautiful boy, Pothos, sometimes aka Anteros, who signifies love for someone faraway. I suppose you could call him, you could call his kind of desire, his kind of love, longing. I find out that there is no direct way to translate “longing.” In Italian “desire” and
“To Long”
The god Eros has, sometimes, more or less, given mythic variations, two or three lovely brothers: Anteros, god of requited love, the one who wants things to work out and believes that love must be answered if it is to prosper (Anteros honey! Where are you when we need you?);
“Paradise net”
Collage by Randall Hamilton I strongly dreamed this term, “paradise net.” When I awoke it had lost its meaning but retained the sense, the odor, the aura, that it was indeed meaningful what could it mean? Each word alone -- easy. Combined, each comes into question in relation to the other term.
Stones May 2021
I spent most of the last year sitting in front of a tall double window that looks out on a courtyard-garden filled with stones. “Gravel” is what we call it when a truck pulls up and empties its load and men rake it out over a 40’x80’surface. “Pebbles” when they
Names of types of stones
Legna rotta Infilled: intarsia, litografia Tiny sfinge Madonnas Something is emerging Glued by time and force Discovery of golden tongues Blooms of stone O quickly fading x in my more slowly fading hand If you don’t like it wait 10 million years
Some stones prefer not to be photographed
I always look serious/It steals the soul/bad hair day/not today/I believe in impermanence/I’m ugly/it prioritizes the visual /it’s against my beliefs/ touch me instead
Stones are
Stones are imprisoned by other stones Are being born out of stones Are sending messages from within other stones Are assimilated integrated, hybrid, or in conflict Were once squeezed together so tightly. Are in a multi-million-year process of argument and adjustment Or have come to rest, as in my courtyard, and have come mostly to know
How rocks are like cinema
In lockdown, in lieu of going to the movies, I watched rocks coming and going very very slowly, in a time frame longer than movies, even longer than lockdown. I studied each rock hoping to see how it is in the process of disappearing and how it is evolving into
Centrale Montemartini
Lo how the mighty. There’s ex-mightiness all around here, the might of the grand machinery now “fallen silent” – “fallen” – the might of the empire now “fallen” but now so long ago that it’s settled like dust. In fact it IS dust, and I think every day as I
Statues, Stones, Flowers, Mother
Statues come from a mineral material we call marble, porphyry, limestone, rock, rocks, stone, stones, gravel, pebble, sand. It’s undignified to call statues rocks, but they are, shaped rocks. Michelangelo looks almost cliché today, Prisoners the brilliant idea of a first-year student attempting to be “conceptual,” but really it was
This City
Quick, go to the window! You'll see this city. Creeping by in the moonlight in the streetlight in the stony street. It's full of people making noise but it is silent, a silence that is regal or bewildered, as if it glides by in a silent gown or is simply overwhelmed by itself. There is nothing as beautiful as a city except for this
The Jause
The story of Grandma Melanie’s broken-hearted bohemian painter-lover was one of the stories Fritz and his friends told like mantras as they sat at home in Rego Park or Flushing or in the Giant Pickle Diner, stories about people from the Other World, the world before the war, about thwarted
Rich With History
It should come as no surprise that Rome is a dusty city. All those tumbling fragments, the withdrawal of the water after a flood leaving behind a silt-filled city, the centuries of statues chopped to powder to transform gods and fauns into lime for cement. And not just statues, but