“I didn’t have a chance. He came out of the bathroom.”

She put her arms around him from behind, and he turned, surprised, but willing. She kissed him full on the mouth, then undid his zipper and kicked off her boots. Alex tried to lead her toward the other room, where they could lie down on the sofa bed, but Sasha dropped to her knees beside the tables and pulled him down, the Persian carpet prickling her back, street light falling through the window onto his hungry, hopeful face, his bare white thighs.

winter is almost over; children grow so fast; kids hate scarves; it’s too late, they’re out the door

“Wait,” she said. “You haven’t seen—I’m desperate.”

Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute.

Sasha felt the waiters eying her as she sidled back to the table holding her handbag with its secret weight

mirthful

five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocket knife, twenty-eight bars of soap, eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she’d used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred and sixty dollars online,

than with a lot of the things she’d lifted over the past year,

But on the first anniversary of the tower’s completion — at early dawn, before the concourse had surrounded it — an earthquake came; one loud crash was heard. The stone pine, with all its bower of songsters, lay overthrown upon the plain.

Glancing backwards, they saw the groined belfry crashed sideways in. It afterwards appeared that the powerful peasant who had the bell rope in charge, wishing to test at once the full glory of the bell, had swayed down upon the rope with one concentrate jerk. The mass of quaking metal, too ponderous for its frame, and strangely feeble somewhere at its top, loosed from its fastening, tore sideways down, and, tumbling in one sheer fall three hundred feet to the soft sward below, buried itself inverted and half out of sight.

True artist, he here became absorbed, and absorption still further intensified, it may be, by his striving to abate that strange look of Una, which, though, before others, he had treated with such unconcern, might not, in secret, have been without its thorn.

Some averred that it was the spaniel, gone mad by fear, which was shot. This, others denied. True it was, the spaniel never more was seen; and, probably for some unknown reason, it shared the burial now to be related of the domino.

Only one hour more. Impatience grew. Watches were held in hands of feverish men, who stood, now scrutinizing their small dial-plates, and then, with neck thrown back, gazing toward the belfry as if the eve might foretell that which could only be made sensible to the ear, for, as yet, there was no dial to the tower clock.

Strange sounds, too, were heard, or were thought to be, by those whom anxious watching might not have left mentally undisturbed — sounds, not only of some ringing implement, but also, so they said, half-suppressed screams and plainings, such as might have issued from some ghostly engine overplied.

last-flung shadow of the perished trunk;

This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game.

Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work. It was even worse than he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity.

You want to suck my dick?

Oh, bravo, ” Anders said. “Dead meat.” He turned to the woman in front of him. “Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.”

Heaven will take note.

“One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more.”

forever;

your little day,

Yet, a week later, what is their reward? Views of the changeless ocean leave them bored, And it would be ungenerous to deny The girls were pretty and the boys were boys.

Meanwhile the elders breathe a grateful sigh;

They are viewed by dry, bird-wristed, blue-rinsed crones With diamond rings and teeth of Klondike gold Mounted on a frail armature of bones; Their hatted husbands, once, perhaps, adored, Now paunchy, rheumatoid, and feeling old, Who joust at chess, assault at shuffleboard.

The boys are beery, laying plots to score,

Upon one’s notice pelvis, butt, and bust,

They stand a while in flickering light, rehearsing the children’s names and birthdays.

a small balloon

Someone she loved once passed by – too late

while you grew smaller, more breakable with distance

I kept waiting for the thud of your crash as I sprinted to catch up,

Night after night the big plows rumble and bale it like dirty laundry

pale as oatmeal, bears up like sheep before shearing.

Someone calls out his name in a voice so like his mother’s, a startled tear splashes the tip of his right boot.

Tell me a time, I have not loved, A mountain left unclimbed: A prairie field Where I have not furrowed my tongue, Nourished it out of the mind’s dark places; Planted with tears unwept And harvested as friends, as faces.

On a sheltering island

I was in those rooms, with my child, with my back turned to her, searching—oh irony!— for beautiful things.

My daughter stood at the other end of the room,

I’m older now, and now, and now.

He doesn’t know what time is, doesn’t know how in no time those numbers will fill his days the way water fills a bath

But it does make one stop and think how driven we are, even the least, to hear the world’s incessant undersong—

Like you, I’d kill a mosquito in a moment.

My husband frowned, drank more beer.

Now my children go to American High Schools. They speak English.

Thing he must do, now that he is home, is decide who This woman is, this old, white-haired woman Standing here in the doorway, Welcoming him in.

There is no time for that now. No time for music,

his mind rattling