#Americans #PulitzerPrize
Here, on fine long legs springy as… a life rides, sealed in a small br… that skims along over the basement… wrapped up in a simple obsession. Eight legs reach out like the mast…
On the floor of a parking garage I found a dead mouse. It was wint… the world gone gray outside and in… and the mouse a part of all that d… the smallest part. He stood
Long ago we quit lifting our heels like the others—horse, dog, and ti… though we thrill to their speed as they flee. Even the mouse bearing the great weight of a nugg…
The next morning I felt that our… had been lifted away from its foun… during the night, and was now adri… though so heavy it drew a foot or… of whatever was buoying it up, not…
Beside the highway, the Giant Sli… with its rusty undulations lifts out of the weeds. It hasn’t been u… for a generation. The ticket booth tilts to that side where the nicke…
In the clinic, a sun-bleached shel… on the shore of the city, you ente… the last small chamber, a little c… chastened with pearl, cool, white,… and over the chilly well of the to…
The gravel road rides with a slow… over the fields, the telephone lin… streaming behind, its billow of du… full of the sparks of redwing blac… On either side, those dear old lad…
The divorce judge has asked for a… and you wait at the back of the co… as still as a flag on its stand, y… falling in smooth, even folds that… to gather the dust of white bouque…
Circling above us, their wingtips fanned like fingers, it is as if they wer… one of those tissue-paper sewing p… over the pale blue fabric of the a…
Slap of the screen door, flat knoc… of my grandmother’s boxy black sho… on the wooden stoop, the hush and… of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned… out to the edge and then, toed in
In her eighties now, and weak and… with emphysema, my aunt sends me a birthday card-a tossing ocean with clipper ship-and wishes me we… at forty-four. She’s included
You lie in your bed and sigh, and the springs deep in the mattre… sing out with the same low note, mocking your sadness. It’s hard— not the mattress, but life.
They have set aside their black ti… scratched and dented, spattered with drops of pink and b… and their dried-up, rolled-up tube… of alizarin crimson, chrome green,
It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill with a morning light so bright you can’t see beyond its windows into the afternoon. A kitchen falling through time with its thin…
It seemed those rose-pink dishes she kept for special company were always cold, brought down from the shelf in jingling stacks, the plates like the panes of ice