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Everything is mine on loan: the leaves I’ve combed out of my hands.

“I’m sorry,” I wrote, “but I have to go back to the bookstore.” My only plan was to plead for my old job back. To my surprise, it worked. The law was safe; the law was my father. I decided to go to law school.

It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps the evening you died.

I used to be known for the humor of my music, the lightness of touch.

James Salter

James Salter

She had boyfriends before she met him. Well, not really boyfriends.

I was once a rider of mastodons, a waitress showing skin.

A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. It’s a little like cheating.

All down my street the new fathers beat the kingness out of the kings.

Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash.

She holds her smile like a note sustained at the end of a phrase.

The Poet Laureate reads three poems in his New Hampshire home.

Her sly smile was a vicious remnant of her life before Real Life began.

I have tried and failed to renew my vows to real trees whom I love.

The appetite for self-surrender is nothing new in our makeup.

The past is never done with. It begs to be fed, demands to be eaten.

I halt and watch a monk, under plum boughs, sweeping flitting shreds.

I played a game I called ocean, resisted my need for air.

Those trees—each an epoch with its origin and history, rising into night.

If it were fiction, calling the place Newtown would be too much.

I am not prepared for postwar Freetown. Postwar Sierra Leone.

The legendary author Robert Stone, in the words of his friends.

Burly Viking raiders are standing in the coffee line, sharing pickles.

I wear a gray sweater not unlike the one my father used to wear.

The world is where we brace for a joke that’s about to be played on us.

As far as I was concerned you need never have been my father.

I keep waking up on the edge of the black lake. He’s on the other side.

I was happy I had no one to talk to, to be alone. Happy to be in the hospital.