Watching them makes me feel like an intruder, leering at something intimate behind lace curtains, but I can't help myself. I feel an upsurge of belief again, a regeneration of my spirit, which, if you must know, has sagged a little with age. They are the image of fresh love, the kind that unrolls its crenellations, undressed to its core. They prove that love is still in style, that it continues to be kind despite the coldness of virtual reality.

They glow like love stars in a constellation, impenetrable, distant: he, leaning in slightly, she, head bowed demurely toward him. Both somewhat shy, about the same height, ash-blond, big-eyed, and certain in their geometry. When they sit together, their shoulders, their thighs, their calves, their fingertips melt into a seamless stream. Their lips murmur indistinct secrets. I am both fascinated and embarrassed.

When they walk through the halls, their voices are low, quiet, blending into the raucous chaos surrounding them. They flow in and out, scarcely visible, two abreast, among a rush of bodies hurrying to class, shielded by the armor of love. By virtue of their existence, all witnesses are a bit sweeter, elevated by their gentle smiles.  continue

In March, the phone calls started. Sharon's mother only called when she needed to push. This time she was pushing Sharon to see a psychologist because of the sound of her voice. Her mother knew its every timber and detected a tinny off-key note over the telephone, three thousand miles away in her condo in Florida. A short, assertive woman, she wore jangling jewelry and made up for her lack of inches by talking in high decibels.

Mother had a name and a number and she was pushing it. "His name is Dr. L. J. Lewis. I don't know what the 'L' stands for but the Meltzers met his uncle at a canasta tournament," she announced into Sharon's answering machine. "Brains run in the family. Call him, will you?"

No one trigger made Sharon's voice quiver. It may have started with the military surge in Afghanistan and the feeling of impotence that comes when soldiers are sent to battle. Or just a feeling of impotence in general, as she sat, cross-legged on the floor, staring at her toes, thinking about why she did what she did and if what she did was worth doing. Why shower? Did refugees from Afghanistan squander gallons of water a day to smell clean? Why eat? In Sudan, three meals were for militants on a raid. Why teach art? In Haiti, a paintbrush could not stop a child from being forced into slavery as a restavèk. Did the world need her to teach, and if not, what was her purpose? She'd negotiated four weeks of unpaid medical leave but would soon have to return to her classroom or lose her job. This was week three and she had no answer.  continue

Reading about Bernard Madoff made me feel really good about myself. I don't mean ordinary good, but extraordinary, off-the-charts good. Sixty-five billion dollars missing from client accounts! Retirement funds! People's life savings! How could he do it? I would never do anything like that, I thought. I am a normal guy, a good guy. Unlike that guy. That guy is a psychopath. It was a Saturday morning, and I'd been drinking my coffee in the living room, reading the paper, taking it easy.

"Cassie," I called to my wife, "come here." She was busy at her computer. I don't know what she does there, but she does an awful lot of it. I can hardly get her attention anymore. This time, though, she must have heard some urgency in my voice, because she came, disheveled, still in her pajamas because she heads for the computer right after breakfast. "You won't believe this," I said. "I'm reading about a psychopath. Bilked people for sixty-five billion dollars. Bought himself boats and planes and mansions all over the world. Can you imagine?"

"Who says he's a psychopath?"

"I say he's a psychopath! How could someone do that and not be a psychopath?"

"You shouldn't throw words like that around unless you know what you're talking about. There must be a clinical definition."

I hate it when Cassie gets contrary. Sometimes it seems like she lives to contradict me. I do appreciate it, however, that she has a brain.  continue

In the morning, the ship came through the storm into an arctic high pressure system the size of California, Nevada, and Utah. Snow from the night before left a frosting on top of the boxes. The containers above deck resembled boxcars snow-bound in the Chicago yard.

Driving off the clouds and snow, the wind had scraped sea and sky, leaving it clear, clean, and bitter cold. Passing 180 degrees longitude, the ship crossed the international dateline. Legend had it that when the light was right, a gold vein shining up from the depths could be seen by an old timer on his last voyage and the new sailor on his first. Sailing into tomorrow, ship and men skipped a day and climbed over the fence.

The American flag snapped in the wind. The open ocean lay raw and inscrutable. Heading west to the Far East on the great north circle, they'd soon be turning south for Japan. Not soon enough.  continue

Lee's ten was up. The Asian chick who'd owned the table for the last two hours twirled her cue and eyed him through black-rimmed glasses. Twenty-five, twenty-six, and frosty under pressure, there was no denying she looked good. Better than good in those skinny jeans, five-inch heels, and tight t-shirt.

Her t-shirt read "Bitchin'" across firm, little breasts.

"Rack 'em, man," she said with a lilt. Black hair draped her shoulders.

"No problemo," Lee said.

Maybe she was tired or bored. Maybe she was playing him. Whatever, Lee was surprised to take her so easily. Nothing fell on her break, then he sunk the one and got the two before hiding behind the five. She missed a tough cut shot on the three and left him with a kiss off the four into the nine.

After the nine dropped, she took a seat along the side, put up her ten for the next round, and ordered a Dirty Asian. Trinity's was crowded for a Thursday night. An old three-story mansion in New Orleans's warehouse district, the owners had converted the lower floors to a bar and nightclub. On the third floor ancient pin-ball machines and video games with names like "Assassin," "Ghoul Hunter," and "Sniper" lined the walls. Air hockey, shuffle board, and foosball filled one end of the room, pool tables the other. Amateurs shot for fun on the four tables nearest the door. In the back, gamblers gathered around a classic Brunswick with leather pockets. They played nine ball and most games were over in less than five minutes. Winners played for as long as they held the table. The crowd varied from hot kids with their own cues to old-school hustlers. Cigarette smoke, Eagles music, and hard-looking women proliferated.

The Asian chick was the exception.  continue

No one in my family traveled much beyond our home in Philadelphia. My father's sole transatlantic trip occurred when his mother, with her five children, left a Russian shtetl to join her husband in America. Hidden in the back of a hay wagon, they raced across the border to Poland, pistol-wielding Cossacks at their heels. It was 1918 and my father was five years old. My mother, born here to immigrant parents, had never been out of the country except for the road trip to Niagara Falls when our car, a 1956 green Cadillac, went into death throes on the shoulder of the New York Thruway, ultimately succumbing with a strong final shudder in a cloud of steam. There were annual jaunts to Boston to visit family, a few day trips to New York where my father could play with his new movie camera filming his three children at the Statue of Liberty, and summer days at the Jersey Shore.

The world in which I grew up was family-centric, and the focus of its narrative was my older brother — his grades, his study habits, his accomplishments as a pianist, his girlfriends. His activities dominated the daily conversation, and none of it pertained to me. So I filled out my own personal world with books. I desperately wanted to jump down the rabbit hole after Alice. Heidi took me to the Swiss Alps, and Little Women presented a family in which people talked and didn't scream. It was a world much different from mine — no mothers shrieking at their sons at 3 a.m. for staying out late with cuervas (whores), screaming that shiksas (non-Jewish girls) were destroying all chances of acceptance to medical school. I tore through most of the popular book series for young girls — the detectives Judy Bolton and Nancy Drew, the nurse Cherry Ames. I wanted to leave my world and enter theirs.  continue

Sold Almond Joys in eighth-grade snack shop,
nannied three brats, their mommy too,
one long, Connecticut summer. Spent time
checking in your general psychotics, schizoids,
your ruined and wracked at a local county bin.  continue

That his ancestors were stardust, this
we know, and that something happened,
stardust and planetary debris seeking a place
to name home, coalesced, and drifted, rotted
and hunkered down, that things eked forth
and spewed out, and that lumbering creatures
ventured afar, as we imagine that these beasts
hunkered down, into life, and the smaller
continue

We are sitting in Celeste,
Upper West Side, Italian, moderately priced,
cash only, and my grown-up daughter
in front of me is generously shedding tears
from her huge gray eyes into the pasta special,
$11.99 with shallots. My former wife
on my right, whom I still love,
is dropping tears into the broiled red snapper,
ganged up with my daughter
on that all the men are
scoundrels, idiots and nuts.  continue

I am suddenly a poltergeist, slamming open dresser drawers,
pulling Bermuda shorts out of my suitcase faster than a magician
pulls rainbow scarves from his throat. A triangle symphony
clashes as I toss flimsy sun dresses back into the closet.
When I reach the airplane tickets I let them slip from
my fingers onto the bed, a soundless gesture. Delicately,
I unzip my dress (after all it did cost more than our living
room set), and let it pool at my feet like a daub of marshmallow
fluff.  continue

Your kind of poetry arrived unexpected at my door
      worn from the highway,
      trailing wet footprints across my Persian rug.
Road ridden poetry,
      put away wet verse
      you scribed over my living room walls
as they watched us pulse.  continue

happily exclaimed, more
and more often as senility
advanced, until her brain shut  continue

A February two-week pretty
phase and then you scraggle into

setting unpalatable
fruit that birds transport

backyard to sidewalk and
splat onto the cement — exploded  continue

I feel like a footprint
in sand
after the ocean
swept me
away.  continue