Not today. Even when the Isar rolls so cool and deep and I could wade and wade 'til sleep. Not today. When I have the tablets in a drawer in a box winking chalkily at me. Not today. When the church tower soars and it's bells toll out a seductive beat …

Your father, his father, and his before that, your mother, her mother, and all the way back have kept a tradition by chance or by will to each have a baby (or several) until…

—Strip down to your shorts. Put on this gown, open to the rear.

You don't have to push back so hard. We wore our hair long. We wanted the animals to trust us in their wild open spaces. Everything will come undone. We wore our hair long because we wanted to Be able to find our way home in the dark…

You’ve got Wikipedia. Look them up: vagina and penis. What Wikipedia will not tell you, however, is the thousands of years of human anguish, and rapture, wrapped up in those two organs.

And, if you look real close, you see there’s a bullet hole next to his left ear. A stray one went past his head and straight through Santa’s heart.

As the music concludes, I'm finally in control of my emotions . . .

Finally my daughter emerges from behind the silver curtain, riding piggy-back on a gigantic proboscis monkey. She's preoccupied by his nose, and wrings it like a wet dishrag with both hands. If it hurts he's not showing it.

What are our reigning philosophies today, what dominant schools inform and lead our intellectual efforts, inspire our blissful reveries, inflame our breathless humanity?

You’ve got me standin’ on my knees, A’searchin’ for a beggar’s alms, From folks who’re deaf to all my pleas And blind to open palms.

It matters little who thought of it first, what mattered was the schism. Or, to be more accurate, those on the opposite sides of the schism. And, of course, you are a part of this, dear reader. You are of one side or the other.

a dim wood-paneled stair leading to the ladies’ rooms, candle-lit.

I gave you two daughters. I gave you four grandchildren. I'm done.

He woke up four hours later in his car in his garage with the worst headache of his life. He lurched out of the car and kicked over a basket of basil as he toddled towards the door to the house. He stopped and scooped the spilled basil back into the baske

I’m not ready for football. I’m not ready for it, but I live in a southern town that worships at its altar more devoutly than those suicidal beauties in James Wright’s great poem.