Karl Kirchwey

Last night she came to me, my mother, dead: but as she was in the photo, that last Christmas, wearing a red dress, and her lipstick was red (I wonder if that means she lives in hell), and I saw again that she was beautiful, the same high forehead I have, the same wide brow, and just my age, forty-nine; and now I was talking fast, because I knew I had no time, and I told her I loved her, I told her how her life had informed mine, and I begged her to come to me again, to meet my children, my wife. I said to her—My work, see what I have made, I have tried to do what you did not live to do. But she smiled at me and began to fade.

the deep male growl of the sea-lashed headland —Sophocles, Philoctetes August long ago, the summer Lemnian (not like the deeds of those who killed their men), the self a glowing bead, like Hephaestus falling daylong out of heaven in the old story, the island's interior a forge, a glory hole, the odor of wild thyme borne offshore steadily, the Aegean Sea purple, wine-dark, without epithet; and as I walked on the beach, my mother not long dead, the perfect crystal of my self-regard so lately flawed, and landscape made to echo my own low cry in the island's empty places, I found a pure white bone that wind and salt had scoured of every grief and all self-pity: and so I came to the love of others.