The Second Best Man

She’s a glorious bride. I don’t know how this day compares with her dream of the perfect wedding, if she had one, but her face is bliss. I’ve watched her since morning preside over the event like the owner of the day. I saw her take the news about the fallen cake without a twitch.

Money Talks

So many words are already written on a dollar bill, it hardly needs more language from me, words as evocative as God and Trust, as if heaven had to sanction my buying a croissant, beautiful words though, about my public and private debts.

Fat with Promise

I cried on the elevator, then over lunch and later at my desk. It’s funny now. They call me Weeping Will. Weeping Will stands looking at people who know him and though nothing they do is different today

Bobcat in a Box

Life may be short but forgetting takes forever, especially when they leave something behind. It’ll be four years now since Bob walked out with nowhere in particular to go, just trying to make distance from me.

Firebug

It starts as a comic premonition. He yoinks the plug from the drain in the floor of the ocean. He mans the big shovel that scoops whole countries at a time. A ravishing storm of flame consumes the sky and is not satisfied and goes looking.

Saint’s Diary

Can a saint keep a diary? Only a saint could think so. For the rest of us the truth is in the life and all biography is betrayal. We have only so much perspective.

Heart Is Killing

Dear mother, father dear sisters, dear wife, babies I am not sadness dying. That pain does not kill me. The stronger is making me I am sure when I work too long if I will ever come back. You send me everything from your letters that home is new. You are spending my money I hope.

Some Hug

Two inches in any direction would topple the whole apparatus. But don’t think. Don’t think for godssake don’t talk, embrace the hug. Two inches along the plane defined by the circle of the horizon in any direction, if you must. But stop.

Surprise Ending

I’ve seen this movie fifty-nine times, but that’s not why it knows me. It’s set in a country that’s not my own, at a time I can only imagine. Mysterious things happen to families unlike families I know—still mysterious on a sixtieth viewing, though I know everything that will happen, and when, and every line.

The Fixer

If love is not the sum of my every day, it’s what I add to every day, or I don’t know love. At large in the world, seeking nothing but a chance, I materialize where small insufficiencies require me.