Je suis geryon

I just discovered that I write exactly like Anne Carson. Not her practice per se which includes a house stripped of furniture in Michigan and a summer off from teaching.

But read Autobiography of Red and you'll see what I mean.


Learned about the nesting rooms of the world at an early stage.

His mother left him at the doors of the school bus, that opened like those of silently-still observed clams at low tide.

From then on, the ride to school and the walk to the front doors, he was alone.

He wasn't stupid; he knew to stay silent.

It was early fall and as he walked toward the school the summer before turned red in his mind, and then brown like a leaf that is melting under frost.

The optics of the school--the windows--through them he saw the struggles of children fighting over paste.

He kept his hands in his pockets and took one last look at the world around him before entering school. Miles of blackboards stretched down the road where they had been planted in their wooden legs in cement and the wind caused some of them on looser spigots to twirl like windmills, revealing logical fallacies on the opposite sides as they blew in circles. Then, further off, the fields of desks, as far as he could see, ending where a barn broke up into the horizo like a black scab, and some of the desks were glistening in the sun from the water that the automatic irrigation system had just passed over them in a wand that looked to him like fairy dust.

The giant legs of first graders came down among the rows and rows of desks, and their books fell like avalanches. The air grew ashy with dust and the smell of burning book-ink.

He entered the school, which had the affect of swinging back on a swingset so that the ground and sky switch places and one experiences the vertigo of the little birds who fly to high toward the sun--the rooms were carpeted in moss and empty of people. He walked toward a stream flowing down the hall, his crawfish bucket in his hand...