Sublime

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

He’ll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong. He’ll die without knowing what she’s powerless to tell him—that he has helped her. That his heart is as good and as worthy as wood.

poem called “Married”: I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment, crying hard, searching for my wife’s hair. For two months got them from the drain, from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator, and off the clothes in the closet. But after other Japanese women came, there was no way to be sure which were hers, and I stopped.

Loss of self. Of all of the forms of impoverishment that can be seen or felt in America, loss of self, or death in life, is surely the most devastating. Beginning with school, if not before, we are systematically stripped of imagination, creativity, heritage, dreams and personal uniqueness in order to style us into productive units for a mass, tech

At the Dinky Donut, outside town, Bob Pardee sat quietly as the family ate and talked. The soft pink golfer’s face had begun to droop from his skull. His flesh seemed generally to sag, giving him the hang-dog look of someone under strict orders to lose weight. His hair was expensively cut and layered, a certain amount of color combed in, a certain