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One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”

He did it deliberately &

so when the police tracked him down he was

able to explain it so

clearly they had to

agree. Still, they hadn’t done it.

Anyway, he’d checked it out &

it was what they’d suspected,

women! – women just

opened & spilled, there was

nothing special in there after all.

In 1959, Prentice Ross astounded his parents by enrolling in aviation school instead of going to Yale. Of course, being generous and humane people, Prentice’s parents didn’t have anything against pilots per se. It just happened that they had never met one, nor had they ever even thought of how a person became one. In fact, they knew not a single person who drove any machine at all (for a living, that is), so they were at a loss when they tried to imagine what their son’s future would be like.

Long ago a fish forgot what fins were good for

And flew out of the stream

It was not dreaming

It had no ambition but confusion

In Nova Scotia it lies on ice in the sun

and its eye turns white and pops out like a pearl

when it’s broiled

The Titanic is the one that got away.

Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for

my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.

She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers

what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.

We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.

A grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.