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It was almost dusk: then it was. Patty was going to have dinner with us, and wanted some tea. My boys had laid the fire, but we’d forgotten to bring water to the campsite, so I walked down to the Park Service pump just uphill from the edge of Looping Lake, named (according to a plaque affixed to some giant toy logs) in honor of Jeffrey T. Looping, a park ranger, drowned rescuing an infant (who survived, grew up, and became a distinguished circuit court judge) in tangled and deflating waterwings. The lake was for fishing—it was stocked—not for swimming. We usually swam at night, discreetly nude, if it wasn’t too cold; we never fished. Even the night swimming, closely supervised, was better than allowing the kids to dive from the abrupt impossible heights of drilled stone over any of the old, snakeridden quarries in the area. Some of those quarries were quite dry, some had filled to the brim with years of rain (and were beer and pot-party haunts besides, where local kids would be sure to pick fights with any interloping city boys). And sometimes water that looked deep from above was only a mirror’s inch of sky.

Horizon was reddening. My flip-flops—inappropriate shoes for walking on loose rocks, but otherwise comfortable—dragged in the gravel. Occasionally we would see stone blocks lying in the woods, fluted, almost, like column drums: discarded long ago by quarriers who’d found cracks or crumbling veins of unwanted stone. Looping Lake was manmade, and I wondered if the earthen dam at one end had been reinforced with other abandoned blocks. Probably: there was a gravel road across it.

Pump-rush; pump-rush; the squeaky thing cranked our galvanized bucket full, though there was something too soft (I thought) behind its pressure. Like many outmoded things, the pump was pleasant to use—pleasant for me, anyway, in a way it must rarely have been to some sober drudge who had no better plumbing, back in the gadgetless, pioneer past. Then, it was work. (It was work for us, of a different kind, being this close to the wild, and yet insulating ourselves from it, keeping almost the same safe distance we were accustomed to.)

The story first appeared in Southwest Review.

> Read it here.

Dark Ice is a long poem with detailed notes and parodies of notes, in which Russian and American history begin to melt, run together, and recrystalize into strange new forms. The poem appeared in print in Bomb; the poem plus the notes appeared online on the NABOKV-L Listserv, and on the International Vladimir Nabokov Society’s Zembla website. According to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which gave me a prize, the poem presents ”a marbled-paper dreamland where cultural antitheses are swirled together.”

You can read it here:

We are abstractions, as if the infinite
Had to eat, hold down a day job, ride the bus.

Wax and Glass, by the way, follows this pattern in stanza line length:

2

4 (2 x 2)

16 (4 x 4)

256 (16 x 16)

The squaring has to do with the subject of the poem.