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When I open my eyes, there’s the eastern innerborder of my home state,the hands greenish with creamy granularphosphorescence, and the hinge of the anglethe lake of my childhood: purple underthunderheads;…

When my hand is groping on the tool-room shelf for ex-marital liquor to drink by myself,it bumps something it knows by one bumpand rustle, one chocolate bar, with almonds, then…

Someone said, Do you miss the Bay Area,and suddenly I adored the phrase “the Bay Area,”as if “area” were a newly made wordmade between a body of water and a…

I’m glad that my mother was cremated whole,despite the operatic crackling andMedean explosions in the box, and the singingof the fat as it gave up its bright ghost,glad she was…

Sometimes I’ll suddenly remember the powerof her house, and of the approach to it,down the narrow, extreme-curve-to-the-right street, opening onto the somehow delicate cul-de-sac, mybest friend’shouse—what?Italianate? Ogive windows, balconies, tile…

That poet you scornedfor retiring when he was forty, then beginning thirty years laterwith the same voice and styleThe crack in his life invisible What he said in youthand approaching…

Michael Ondaatje

Irene Oppenheim

Barred from swimming pools the hot summer longbut loving the delicious cold on our skins,we dove in ditches dug to irrigatethe same fields where our fathers slogged, underthe supervising eye…

Cynthia Ozick