Rim John Quotes

Tonight the sun has died like an Emperor ... great scarlet arcs of silk ... saffron ... green ... crimson ... and the blaze of Venus to remind one of the absolute and the infinite ... and along the lower rim of beauty lay the hard harsh line of the hills ...

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

Sunshine, the old clown, rims the room.

John," I murmured, rising from the bed and going to stand by the table, staring down in astonishment at the gold-rimmed china plates and intricately embroidered napkins in sapphire rings. "How did all of this get here?" "Oh," he said casually. "It just does. Coffee?" He lifted a gleaming silver pot. "Or do I seem to remember you being more partial to tea?" His grin was wicked. I gave him a sarcastic look-it was a cup of tea I'd thrown into his face to escape from the Underworld the last time-then sank down into the chair where the bird was perched.

Was she asleep? He groped beside the bed, among his underclothes, for his wristwatch. He would soon learn, in undressing, to leave it lying discreetly visible. Its silent gold-rimmed face, a tiny banker’s face, stated that he had already been out to lunch an hour and forty minutes. A sour burning began to revolve in his stomach.

Nearly everyone has had a box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will [Hamilton] had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering [...] He was always on the edge, trying to hold on to the rim of the family with what gifts he had - care, and reason, application. He kept the books, hired the attorneys, called the undertaker, and eventually paid the bills. The others didn't even know they needed him.

You know who invented the twist, right?” asked the man next to him. “It was John D. Rockefeller. He was a germophobe, and citrus was a natural disinfectant, so Rockefeller always asked his bartenders to run a lemon peel around the rim of his glass.

Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering. He thought of himself as slow, doltish, conservative, uninspired. No great dream lifted him high and no despair forced self destruction. He was always on the edge, trying to hold on to the rim of the family with what gifts he had—care, and reason, application. He kept the books, hired the attorneys, called the undertaker, and eventually paid the bills. The others didn’t even know they needed him. He had the ability to get money and to keep it. He thought the Hamiltons despised him for his one ability. He had loved them doggedly, had always been at hand with his money to pull them out of their errors. He thought they were ashamed of him, and he fought bitterly for their recognition. All of this was in the frozen wind that blew through him.

eyes were rimmed with red and framed by dark circles. He looked like a man at the gallows with a noose around his neck, waiting for the floor to drop away beneath his feet. The man leaned forward and placed his palms on the digital tabletop, where a haphazard scattering of apps

Sam had dark curly hair that he wore parted in the middle and bluntly cut, just above his shoulders. He wore cheap John Lennon–style wire-rimmed glasses and one of those rough hemp striped parkas that are sold in Mexico. His blue jeans were holey and faded to almost white, and he paired his Teva sandals with thick white athletic socks.

So this is the Sierras, eh?” he said, looking out over the dark lake. “All that time growing up I never made it up here before.” “It’s the Range of Light,” I said, passing the joint back to him. “That’s what John Muir called it. I can see why. I’ve never seen light like I have out here. All the sunsets and sunrises against the mountains.” “You’re on a spirit walk, aren’t you?” Paco said, staring into the fire. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you could call it that.” “That’s what it is,” he said, looking at me intensely. He stood. “I’ve got something I want to give you.” He went to the back of the truck and returned with a T-shirt. He handed it to me and I held it up. On the front was a giant picture of Bob Marley, his dreadlocks surrounded by images of electric guitars and pre-Columbian effigies in profile. On the back was a picture of Haile Selassie, the man Rastafarians thought was God incarnate, rimmed by a red and green and gold swirl. “That is a sacred shirt,” Paco said as I studied it by the firelight. “I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.” I nodded, silenced by emotion and the half-drunk

Through all this relentlessly advancing technology the same brain gropes through its diminishing neurons for images and narratives that will lift lumps out of the earth and put them under the glass case of published print. With ominous frequency, I can’t think of the right word. I know there is a word; I can visualize the exact shape it occupies in the jigsaw puzzle of the English language. But the word itself, with its precise edges and unique tint of meaning, hangs on the misty rim of consciousness. Eventually, with shamefaced recourse to my well-thumbed thesaurus or to a germane encyclopedia article, I may pin the word down, only to discover that it unfortunately rhymes with the adjoining word of the sentence.

...with his dripping basket and flip-flapped up the hill. Then a car turned into Cannery Row and Doc drove up to the front of the laboratory. His eyes were red rimmed with fatigue. He moved slowly with tiredness. When the car had stopped, he sat still for a moment to let the road jumps get out of his nerves. Then he climbed out of the car. At his step on the stairs, the rattlesnakes ran out their tongues and listened with their waving forked tongues. The rats scampered madly about the cages. Doc climbed the stairs. He looked in wonder at the sagging door and at the broken window. The weariness seemed to go out of him. He stepped quickly inside. Then he went quickly from room to room, stepping around the broken glass. He bent down.

When Gene Crutchfield brought his troubled friend to Hopkins in 1938, Hopkins was twenty-four years old and in charge of LeKies Memorial, the Methodist church in the Atlantic City neighborhood. He had taken over the parish the year before and wore a mustache to try to make himself look older. It complemented his horn-rimmed glasses and added a bit of distinction to an otherwise unimpressive medium height and build. Hopkins’s father and grandfather had been Methodist ministers, but tradition was not the reason he had dropped out of law school and entered the ministry. He had been attracted by the ideas then being promoted within the Methodist Church in Virginia. They were ideas of the kind that are now taken for granted in American life—nutrition and welfare support for dependent children; free medical care for the impoverished and the aged; the right of workers to organize a union, to receive a minimum wage, to strike; interracial cooperation.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade. The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobal, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin’s kite, bigger than paper towels.

The Sublician is the oldest of our bridges, although it has been destroyed and rebuilt several times. The very name refers to the heavy timbers of which it was once built, but the present bridge is of stone. For many generations it was the only bridge over the Tiber at Rome, because the Etruscans lived on the other bank, and Rome was strong enough to defend only one bridge at a time. The most famous story concerning the bridge is the one about Horatius Cocles, who is said to have held off the army of Lars Porsena single-handed while the Romans dismantled the bridge behind him. There are several versions of this celebrated tale. In one of them, Horatius is simply the point man of a wedge of Romans. In another, he held the bridge with two companions, who fell at his side before the bridge was destroyed. In a third, Horatius held the bridge alone right from the first. Personally, I think only the first version has any truth to it. I have been in many battles and skirmishes and played a heroic part in none of them. But I have seen last-ditch stands and delaying actions in plenty, and I have never seen a place, however narrow, that could be defended against an army by a single man for more than a minute or so. No matter how strong and skillful you are, while one man engages you, somebody else can always thrust a spear over the rim of your shield. And then there are the arrows and sling-stones that always fly about in such profusion when men thirst for one another’s blood. Supposedly, when the bridge was destroyed, Horatius somehow found leisure to address a prayer to Tiberinus, god of the river, and leaped in fully armed and swam across to great applause, to be rewarded richly by the citizenry. Another version has him drowning, which is what usually happens when a man in armor finds himself in deep water.

Will’s fleshy face contorted and a memory swept over him like a chilling wind. He did not move slowly over the past, it was all there in one flash, all of the years, a picture, a feeling and a despair, all stopped the way a fast camera stops the world. There was the flashing Samuel, beautiful as dawn with a fancy like a swallow’s flight, and the brilliant, brooding Tom who was dark fire, Una who rode the storms, and the lovely Mollie, Dessie of laughter, George handsome and with a sweetness that filled a room like the perfume of flowers, and there was Joe, the youngest, the beloved. Each one without effort brought some gift into the family. Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering. He thought of himself as slow, doltish, conservative, uninspired. No great dream lifted him high and no despair forced self-destruction. He was always on the edge, trying to hold on to the rim of the family with what gifts he had—care, and reason, application. He kept the books, hired the attorneys, called the undertaker, and eventually paid the bills. The others didn’t even know they needed him. He had the ability to get money and to keep it. He thought the Hamiltons despised him for his one ability. He had loved them doggedly, had always been at hand with his money to pull them out of their errors. He thought they were ashamed of him, and he fought bitterly for their recognition. All of this was in the frozen wind that blew through him. His slightly bulging eyes were damp as he stared past Cal, and the boy asked, “What’s the matter, Mr. Hamilton? Don’t you feel well?” Will had sensed his family but he had not understood them. And they had accepted him without knowing there was anything to understand. And now this boy came along. Will understood him, felt him, sensed him, recognized him. This was the son he should have had, or the brother, or the father. And the cold wind of memory changed to a warmth toward Cal which gripped him in the stomach and pushed up against his lungs.

The DFL headquarters was a low white-brick building in a St. Paul business park across the Mississippi from downtown that possibly looked hip for fifteen minutes after it was built but no longer did. Lucas talked to a receptionist, who made a call. Schariff came out and got him, and said, “We’re down in the conference room.” “Who’s we?” Lucas asked. “Me and Daryl Larson, our attorney,” Schariff said. He was a stocky, dark-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard and dark-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a white shirt with a couple of pens in a plastic pocket protector. In any other circumstance, Lucas would have been willing to arrest him on the basis of the pocket protector alone. “I asked, and everybody said when you’re talking to a cop . . . especially one investigating the Grant-Smalls fight . . .” “Okay,” Lucas said. Larson was a tall, thin man whom Lucas knew through Weather’s association with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Larson raised money for the orchestra, usually by wheedling rich wives; it’d worked with Weather. When Lucas stepped into the room, Larson put down the paper he’d been reading and stood to shake hands. “Lucas, nice to see you. How’s Weather?” “Broke. She’s broke. She’s got no money left. She’s wondering how we’re going to feed the kids.” “Hate to hear that,” Larson said, with a toothy smile. “I’ll call her with my condolences.” The pleasantries out of the way, they settled into the conference chairs and Lucas outlined some of what he knew and believed about Tubbs’s disappearance. He finished by saying, “You guys are probably not going to want to talk about this, because when the media puts Tubbs’s disappearance together with the porn trick . . . it’s gonna look bad.

the whole reason for John’s Revelation is to encourage the churches strewn around the rim of the Mediterranean to lift up their eyes from the imperial power of Rome and every earthly Babylon. John is commissioned to bring these churches a vision of ultimate reality, in all its glory and justice, so that they can live faithfully, candles set in lampstands in a dimly lit world.

A few days after I began my short story, I returned to his desk and handed him my updates. He pushed his wire-rimmed reading glasses way down on his nose and focused on the two pages. “Okay, you got a beginning; you got yourself a middle and an end. You got a wing-dinger opening line. But you don’t have an establishing paragraph. Do you know what that is?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “It’s kinda like an outdated road map for the reader,” he said. “It gives the reader a general idea of where you’re taking him, but doesn’t tell him exactly how you intend to get there, which is all he needs to know.

What is the universe, anyway? To test your knowledge of the universe, please complete the following sentence. The universe (a)   consists of all things visible and invisible—what is, has been, and will be. (b)   began 13.8 billion years ago in a giant explosion called the Big Bang and encompasses all planets, stars, galaxies, space, and time. (c)   was licked out of the salty rim of the primordial fiery pit by the tongue of a giant cow. (d)   All of the above. (Correct answer below.)

Yep, maybe he was just a nice guy after all, with a bona fide offer, but all the same, I didn’t want to chance him rimming the cup with his genitals first. There is a world of difference between a cheery wave, and trusting a criminal with your drink. We are never going to be best pals.

And when the ritual was finished, the SEAL returned to the bag for something else to inventory or clean, and finding the bag empty the SEAL left, leaving John Dempsey alone—head down, palms flat on the workbench, eyes rimmed with tears. “You okay?” Grimes asked. He didn’t answer.

The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity. A handful of Western countries passed. Germany was an outstanding performer in Europe, while Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, and, surprisingly, Greece did well. New Zealand and Australia were champions on the Pacific rim. But most Western countries, particularly America and Britain, failed the test, humiliatingly so when compared with countries in Asia.

Customers flooded back to stores dissatisfied with their touch-screen BlackBerrys. Balsillie knew returns were high. What he didn’t realize was how severe the problem was. As their meeting got under way, Verizon’s chief marketing officer, John Stratton, laid out the shocking news to his guests from Waterloo. Virtually every one of the first batch of about 1 million Storms shipped needed replacing. Many of the replacements were being returned as well. The Storm was a complete failure, and he wanted RIM to pay.

it was impossible to know what went on inside that brain. His eyes, behind their wire-rim glasses, never betrayed any emotion. During their first meeting, Daniel calmly explained why Tyler’s CV calculations were wrong: Tyler was taking into account the six values, or “replicates,” generated during each Edison test instead of just the median of those six values. The final result Theranos reported to a patient was the median, so only that number was relevant to CV calculations, he said. Daniel may have technically been correct, but Tyler had put his finger on a central weakness of the Edison device: its pipette tips were terribly imprecise. Generating six measurements during each test and then selecting the median was a way to correct for that imprecision. If the tips had been reliable in the first place, there would have been no need for such contortions.

Of all that’s holy, I think we are standing at the rim of hell,” Harry said, peering at the mounds of stacked bodies. “There must be hundreds of corpses here.

Two-One Alpha, ready for you. Move it. We’re in kind of a hurry to find a quieter place!” Two wounded men were hauled to the helicopter first by four of their buddies, with the rest strafing the hill to keep the Taliban heads down. The fright and panic in the eyes and faces of the soldiers were clearly visible. Their screams rose above the thundering noise of the engines as they pushed the wounded in and then took up position outside the chopper to provide covering fire for the remaining men to get in. “All in. Let’s get out of here!” Leo shouted. “Grab tight. It’s going to be a rough ride boys!” John pulled the chopper into a steep climb while banking away from the hill. With no fire coming from the doorgun to keep them down, the full force and frustration of the enemy was now directed at the chopper and its occupants. They saw their prey escaping out of their hands right in front of their eyes. A burning pain shot through John’s back and legs as the body of the helicopter shuddered under the power of the two Rolls-Royce Gem turboshaft engines at full throttle. Smoke started to billow from the starboard engine. I have to get over that hill three miles away. Why am I dizzy? I have to get these boys out of trouble. I have to level the chopper and save power. I must get over that hill. I must get out of the reach of the bullets. “Doug! Doug! Can you hear me? What’s wrong man?” Leo screamed in a high-pitched, panicked voice. “Oh my God, you’ve been hit! Are you ok? Shit man, put the chopper down now. You’ll crash and kill us all!” “That hill … I have to get over it … out of range … I must get us there ...” Doug stuttered. “What was that? I can’t hear you. For God’s sake put the chopper down!” Leo shouted at the top of his voice. “Going down, going down … radio for help!” John whispered, a few seconds before everything went dark. The nightmare and the math Doug paid little heed to his passengers as he banked away from the canyon rim. Max was back there to help them. Doug had plenty on his mind, between the flashback to his crash in Afghanistan and wondering when whoever had shot two of his passengers would show up and try to shoot the chopper down here and now, over the Grand Canyon. Not to mention nursing the aging machine to do his bidding. Within minutes after takeoff from the canyon site, lying in the back of the chopper, JR and Roy were oblivious to their surroundings due to the morphine injection administered to them by Max Ellis – an ex-Marine medic and the third member of the Rossler boys’ rescue expedition. Others on the chopper had more on their minds. Raj was in his own world, eyes closed, wondering about his wife Sushma, their child, and the future. He and Sushma were not the outdoors adventure and camping types – living in a cave with other people was going to take some getting used to for them. They both grew up and had lived in the city all their lives. How was this going to work out

BELL WOOD CAME OVER, a big bluff man with a mustache and a gap between his two square front teeth; he wore round gold-rimmed glasses like Teddy Roosevelt. He had a cup of coffee in his hand and nudged the leg of Lucas’s chair. “Sorry about Pole. He can be an asshole.” “I picked up on that,” Lucas said, looking up. “You in decent shape with him?

Still, he pulled firmly at the door, knowing how it swelled and stuck in wet weather. He might have wished to see their faces once more. The face that met him was under a fireman’s helmet, lit by a flashlight held low and expertly angled. The light caught the silver needles of rain, in the air, off the rim of the black hat. It showed him a mouth and a chin and the broad shoulders under the wet rain gear without blinding him or turning the man himself into a grotesque. “I only wanted to warn you,” the man said. He moved the flashlight across his body, to the shrubs beside the steps and then to the grass and then to the weeping willow at the edge of the yard, beside the house. The streetlights were out. Following the moving beam of white light, John Keane saw the grass of his small lawn stir like a rising wave and the roots of the tree—thin as an arm, bent here and there like an elbow—breaking through. The fireman moved the light until it caught the base of the tree where a wider swath of dirt was opening like a mouth, an unhinged jaw filled with broken roots and dirt, and then it closed up again, as if with a breath. “We were driving by and saw it,” the fireman said. “That tree’s gonna fall. It’ll probably fall straight back, but you might want to get your family downstairs. Keep them to this side of the house.” He felt the wind and the rain on his bare ankles, against the hems of his thin pajama pants. He looked beyond the young fireman. In the street, there was no sign of the fire truck or car that had brought him. No coach, either. “Yes,” he said, thinking himself foolish, in his thin pajamas. “Thank you.” “There are trees down all over,” the man added. He raised his chin and in the darkness his eyes seemed as black and wet as his coat. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty. “Take care of your family,” he said, and turned, using his flashlight to get himself down the three steps that led to the door. Squinting against the rain, John Keane watched him cross the path to the sidewalk, the circle of white light leading him, first to the right and then across the street where he might have disappeared altogether, leaving only the pale beam of his flashlight and a flashing reflection of two streaks of silver on his back, and then, as he apparently rounded the opposite corner, not even that.

John Brooks.’ Immediately, I thought of the odds. First of just surviving in such a place, next of surviving and then becoming a cop. ‘Vertical ghettos, each one of them. Me and John used to say it was the only time when you had to take the elevator up when you were going to hell.’ I just nodded. This was out of my realm completely. ‘And that’s only if the elevators were working,’ he added. I realized that I never considered that Brooks might be a black man. There was no photo in the computer printouts and no reason to mention race in the stories. I had just assumed he was white and it was an assumption I would have to analyze later. At the moment, I was trying to figure out what Washington was trying to tell me by taking me here. Washington pulled into a lot next to one of the buildings. There were a couple of dumpsters coated with decades of graffiti slogans. There was a rusted basketball backboard but the rim was long gone. He put the car in park but left it running. I didn’t know if that was to keep the heat flowing or to allow us a quick getaway if needed. I saw a small group of teenagers in long coats, their faces as dark as the sky, scurry from the building closest to us, then cross a frozen courtyard and hustle into one of the other buildings. ‘At this point you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here,’ Washington said then. ‘That’s okay, I understand. A white boy like you.’ Again I said nothing. I was letting him run out his line. ‘See that one, third on the right. That was our building. I was on fourteen with my grand-auntie and John lived with his mother on twelve, one below us. They didn’t have no thirteen, already enough bad luck ’round here. Neither of us had fathers. At least ones that showed up.’ I thought he wanted me to say something but I didn’t know what. I had no earthly idea what kind of struggle the two friends must have had to make it out of the tombstone of a building he had pointed at. I remained mute. ‘We were friends for life. Hell, he ended up marrying my first girlfriend, Edna. Then on the department, after we both made homicide and trained with senior detectives for a few years, we asked to be partnered. And damn, it got approved. Story about us in the

Kanezaki,” I said. He spun, startled to hear my voice so close. “Shit,” he said, perhaps a little embarrassed. I smiled. He looked a little older than he had the last time I had seen him, leaner, more seasoned. The wire-rimmed glasses no longer made him look bookish. Instead, they gave his face… focus, somehow. Precision.

I tried to write a story about a reunion between my father and myself in heaven one time. An early draft of this book in fact began that way. I hoped in the story to become a really good friend of his. But the story turned out perversely, as stories about real people we have known often do. It seemed that in heaven people could be any age they liked, just so long as they had experienced that age on Earth. Thus, John D. Rockefeller, for example, the founder of Standard Oil, could be any age up to ninety-eight. King Tut could be any age up to nineteen, and so on. As author of the story, I was dismayed that my father in heaven chose to be only nine years old. I myself had chosen to be forty-four—respectable, but still quite sexy, too. My dismay with Father turned to embarrassment and anger. He was lemur-like as a nine-year-old, all eyes and hands. He had an endless supply of pencils and pads, and was forever tagging after me, drawing pictures of simply everything and insisting that I admire them when they were done. New acquaintances would sometimes ask me who that strange little boy was, and I would have to reply truthfully, since it was impossible to lie in heaven, “It’s my father.” Bullies liked to torment him, since he was not like other children. He did not enjoy children’s talk and children’s games. Bullies would chase him and catch him and take off his pants and underpants and throw them down the mouth of hell. The mouth of hell looked like a sort of wishing well, but without a bucket and windlass. You could lean over its rim and hear ever so faintly the screams of Hitler and Nero and Salome and Judas and people like that far, far below. I could imagine Hitler, already experiencing maximum agony, periodically finding his head draped with my father’s underpants. Whenever Father had his pants stolen, he would come running to me, purple with rage. As like as not, I had just made some new friends and was impressing them with my urbanity—and there my father would be, bawling bloody murder and with his little pecker waving in the breeze. I complained to my mother about him, but she said she knew nothing about him, or about me, either, since she was only sixteen. So I was stuck with him, and all I could do was yell at him from time to time, “For the love of God, Father, won’t you please grow up!” And so on. It insisted on being a very unfriendly story, so I quit writing it.

You know who invented the twist, right?” asked the man next to him. “It was John D. Rockefeller. He was a germophobe, and citrus was a natural disinfectant, so Rockefeller always asked his bartenders to run a lemon peel around the rim of his glass.” Eddie

I had gone to a house with Lloyd to take a crime report for a case of criminal damage. It was a nice house, in a nice part of town, owned in turn, by a nice couple. The type of place where the TV was turned off, a cup of tea offered and you were one hundred per cent certain that the rim would be smeg free. After

We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed. “Then we came down to the sea, and it was done.” He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red. “That’s what I should be telling instead of stories.” When Jody spoke, Grandfather started and looked down at him.

We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed. “Then we came down to the sea, and it was done.” He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red. “That’s what I should be telling instead of stories.” When Jody spoke, Grandfather started and looked down at him. “Maybe I could lead the people some day,” Jody said.

Sunrise, Grand Canyon We stand on the edge, the fall Into depth, the ascent Of light revelatory, the canyon walls moving Up out of Shadow, lit Colors of the layers cutting Down through darkness, sunrise as it Passes a Precipitate of the river, its burnt tangerine Flare brief, jagged Bleeding above the far rim for a split Second I have imagined You here with me, watching day’s onslaught Standing in your bones-they seem Implied in the record almost By chance- fossil remains held In abundance in the walls, exposed By freeze and thaw, beautiful like a theory stating Who we are is Carried forward by the x Chromosome down the matrilineal line Recessive and riverine, you like Me aberrant and bittersweet... Riding the high Colorado Plateau as the opposing Continental plates force it over A mile upward without buckling, smooth Tensed, muscular fundament, your bones Yet to be wrapped around mine- This will come later, when I return To your place and time... The geologic cross section Of the canyon Dropping From where I stand, hundreds millions of shades of terra cotta, of copper Manganese and rust, the many varieties of stone- Silt, sand, and slate, even “green River rock...”my body voicing its immense Genetic imperatives, human geology falling away Into a Depth i am still unprepared for The canyon cutting down to The great unconformity, a layer So named by the lack Of any fossil evidence to hypothesize About and date such A remote time by, at last no possible Retrospective certainties... John Barton