This blog is officially closed.

I gave up my belief in God
Relinquished all my doubt
So what is it I've left myself
To think and write about?

CHURCH

My neighbor took me to her church last week
--sanctuary, rather, filled with God
where ladies sang and fainted in the aisles.
The preacher spoke in tongues. I knew I was
the only nonbeliever in the crowd,
and yet I found my voice and spoke aloud.

SCHOPENHAUER & HIS MOTHER

When Mother, the famous novelist,
pushed me down a flight of stairs,
I took it as a kind of sign
to reconsider my affairs.

In posterity, I told her,
she'd be remembered just through me.
Her laugh was cruel, and so was mine--
it seemed we laughed identically.

OXFORD, APRIL 2005

Everything was perfect then.
I forced myself to fall in love.
I spent hours at the Bodleian
with the poet from Bromsgrove

while heavy rain undid the river
and dreams of God obscured my sight.
Nothing was repeated, ever.
The fountain basins filled with light.

PORTRAIT

She sits in her car with the windows rolled up, slumped
between the seatback and the door. It’s the end
of October, but the sun still beats the windshield
into a blinding sheet of light. She notices

the mountains, blue and hulking, in the distance,
like a child’s drawing of a monster,
pinned to the wall of a cubicle. A sandwich
sits beside her on the passenger seat, untouched,

wrapped in tinfoil, inside a paper bag. She’s listening
to public radio. A four-hundred-year-old symphony
is playing. It’s easy to forget, for just a moment, that these

are her legs in black polyester pants, that these are her fingers
with their ragged nails and paper cuts, that her job
is contained within that fortress they call a building, that happiness
lies perhaps a hundred miles north or east of here.

On her way home she’ll make a left at Torrey Pines, drive past
the rundown bungalows, fifteen-mile-per-hour
school zones, guard dogs so thin you could count their ribs, and

she will remember suddenly her body: her hands
on the steering wheel, her back against the leather seat.

STRANGERS

She tries to forget the anxiety of leaving the house,
tries to busy herself with other things, the
water spots on the silverware, the dog whining to be
let out, the weekly grocery list: a quart

of milk, a dozen eggs, new bags for the vacuum cleaner. She tries
to remember what her neighbor told her once:
The years you suffer are the best; the years you’re happy
teach you nothing. What

is she afraid of? The young mother
and her gaggle of boys taking turns
pushing each other in the shopping cart? The man
waiting in line for his cappuccino and
a double-shot half-decaf skinny latté
for his wife? She can feel their eyes

on her already, judging her,
her hair (unstyled), clothes (baggy jeans and
shower sandals left over from college), the way she holds

the muscles of her face while talking to the store clerk,
inquiring about the price
of tomatoes, a can of beans. Her sister

would have her believe it’s a form
of narcissism, this obsession with appearances, her flaws and imperfections.

She knows better: she’s learned to gauge
the cruelty of those eyes like
little hooks catching on the back of her sweatshirt. They
can see what’s underneath (the flimsy

t-shirt soaked with sweat), the contents
of her pockets (a wadded tissue,
a stick of gum). She knows how much they hate her—
loathe her—for being
so bold to take up space in their world.