The Hooch family is large and poor.

I have seen the moon make an opaque ghost of the backyard, and I have seen the Hooch animals roam out into it, smelling the life of themselves. They enter the border of visibility and pass through it into the uncanny. . .

. . . From the back of the house, looking over the fishing boat and past it to the wide, brittle leaves at the crown of the unhealthy magnolia, there comes Mrs. Hooch with her Pall Malls, a blotched woman in a bravely colored wrap, her legs lean and veiny. She arrives out of breath. She sits in the flaking chair.

“What are you looking at, Doc?” she says.

“Everything in your back yard looks hungry,” says I. “There’s a bird that looks like he doesn’t know what to do.”

“It’s all we got.”

Looking out at the unhappy foliage.

“Ever since I wasn’t a virgin no more, things have slid down,” she says.

“There must have been love or something,” I say.

“Sure, but it was all downward.”

Barry Hannah’s Ray. It’s like listening to a long great jazz song, or studying someone you have loved and cursed and loved and being able to read the emotions instead of sense them, as if they were written in plain words in short passages that because of the content exceed the normal boundaries of words.

I’ve seen you in the teeming, concupiscent
streets, I married you, at dusk I followed you
into bars; every time I found you
I recognized you as someone seen before.
I could not choose not to respond to desire.
Only you understand.

Old now, I admit to you
I’ve been content for hours watching deer
play out their nimble, nervous lives.
I’ve considered flowers and without sadness
watched them drop their yellow leaves.

Yes. Right. If you are lucky at the right time and in the right place when you are unlucky. We have deer in our yard every morning, every night. The poem goes on for 15 more lines, three stanzas, then picks up to end:

We’ll be sitting side by side,
noontime, in a park.
We’ll not be able to see the sun
due to the excess of light.
I’ll raise my hand to your face
and you’ll tilt your cheek my way,
and I’ll move that lock of hair, now gray,
to where I’ve always liked it to be.

Stephen Dunn. Different Hours.

When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard.

I also finally read read Matthew’s All-American Poem.

There are monsters
hiding
all over the neighborhood
Maybe you are one

Got around to reading Michael Dickman’s The End of the West. Full of monsters, and me and monsters are like me and god.

He’s dead
the dog won’t have to
sleep on his potatoes
any more to keep them
from freezing . . .

Love’s beaten. He
beat it. That’s why
he’s insufferable—
because
he’s here needing a
shave and making love
an inside howl
of anguish and defeat—

He’s come out of the man
and he’s let
the man go

Got onto a real WC Williams kick after pulling one out for Natalie’s lunch poems a few weeks back. I like the humor, the resignation, the freshness, the various ways of looking at death in this one. Most of all I like “he’s come out of the man.” It reminds me of what I tell Natalie about the difference between souls and bodies.

Something very much like nothing anyone had seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.

“What is that?” the Duke asked, palely.

“I don’t know what it is,” said Hark, “but it’s the only one there ever was.”

Magnificence from James Thurber. The 13 Clocks. I guess it’s a story for kids, but, I mean, goddamn, just start taking apart those sentences. How can they be so simple?

the old man who goes about
gathering dog-lime
walks in the gutter
without looking up
and his tread
is more majestic than
that of the Episcopal minister
approaching the pulpit
of a Sunday.
These things
astonish me beyond words.

W. C. wrote another poem titled “Pastoral,” another riff on the same idea, from a direction skewed and keyed just off the other, just as good, I think.

roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colors.

William Carlos Williams. Most of the middle lines. That bluish-green is the best part of the poem for me, but also there’s the title, “Pastoral,” applied to the blighted blocks of his city, and the final stanza, when he buttresses the importance of the poem by admitting no one will believe it to be important. You can listen to him read it here. And this just freaks me out.

. . . I say that a poem has the potential for perfection and this possibility finally silenced me, or sometimes I say that I felt trapped in the poems I tried to write, which is like saying one feels trapped in the universe . . .
Nicole Krauss, “From the Desk of Daniel Varsky

Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled, not destroyed.”
Jonathan Lethem, “The King of Sentences”

. . . our bodies, which seem to bring us the riches of the earth, prevent the world from reaching us. For the eyes of our skin are closed. Brightness streams in on us, and we cannot see. Things flow against us, and we cannot feel.
Steven Millhauser, “The Wizard of West Orange”

Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I’ve been sitting here so long, their falling seems contiguous, close as raindrops.
Karen Russell, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”

Twice already Marie had pointed out the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn, because the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn put her in mind of a haunted house — not a haunted house she had ever actually seen but the mythical one that sometimes appeared in her  mind (with adjacent graveyard and cat on a fence) whenever she saw the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect etc. etc., and she wanted to make sure that, if the kids had a corresponding mythical haunted house that appeared in their minds whenever they saw the brilliance of the etc. etc., it would come up now, so that they could all experience it together, like friends, like college friends on a road trip, sans pot, ha ha ha!
George Saunders, “Puppy”

A few of my favorite sentences from The Best American Short Stories 2008. Beth buys the collection for me every year, has done so for probably close to twenty years now. Poor, I bought them used before that. I think I have them back to ‘84 or a couple years earlier. Of course it is ridiculous to think these are actually the best, but the compilation is always reliably great and also thankfully uneven. I like the series better because I do not like all the stories. Also, the series is where I first read “Ralph the Duck,” which is such a flat-out marvel that I will make sure I own each new book for as long as I can, just as thanks.

Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But when she turned around behind the candlestick and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time.

First three sentences of “Eyes of a Blue Dog,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story in Nothing But You (a collection of love stories from The New Yorker), which Beth bought me for my birthday this summer.