I spur my horse past the ruined city; the ruined city, that wakes the traveler's thoughts: ancient battlements, high and low; old grave mounds, great and small. Where the shadow of a single tumbleweed trembles and the voice of the great trees clings ...
Among Chinese Singaporeans and Malaysians, many hold the belief that when Admiral Cheng Ho landed in Nanyang, he relieved himself in the jungle, and the steaming puddle of shit and piss evolved into the durian tree. To put it less elegantly, the moun...
All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by...
A mist rises from a nearby mound. It could be me, that mist, or simply the caretaker’s mower-dust. If the breeze blows just right, I’ll ghost your solid, entwine your hair. Promise me you won’t shampoo, but carry me along, tiny dust-particles o...
Groping blindly in the darkness, he sank between the white mounds of cool feathers and slept as he fell, across the bed or with his head downward, pushing deep into the softness of the pillows, as if in sleep he wanted to drill through, to explore co...
so is blurred so is blurred in me what white-haired gentleman separated once and for all and said this in the subject this is the object we fall asleep with one hand under our head and with the other in a mound of planets our feet abandon us and tast...
American dream, a spouse, a brace of children, cuddly pets, coffee-table books, rusted skeleton keys, plastic cauliflower bags, business cards of business-card printers, a mound of used airmail envelopes. Old house on moving day, all echoes and lonel...
He rose and walked to the windows. The moon reflected the pristine whiteness blowing into shadowy silvery mounds beneath the stars. It spread out before him, all pure and flowing and sterling. There'd always been a gentle peace and welcome solitude o...
[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual...
Flat outstretched upon a mound Of earth I lie; I press my ear Against its surface and I hear Far off and deep, the measured sound Of heart that beats within the ground. And with it pounds in harmony The swift, familiar heart in me. They pulse as one,...
The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing...
America, it has been observed, is not really a melting pot. It is actually a huge potluck dinner, in which platters of roasted chicken beckon beside casseroles of pasta, mounds of tortillas, stew pots of gumbo, and skillets filled with pilafs of ever...
I'd take cyanide no problem if it was that or throwing a cat out in the street, even a moth-eaten, mangy, caterwauling pain in the ass! I'd rather have the thing in bed with me than see it suffer on my account...though when it comes to human beings, ...
The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparin...
The town stood witness to her fall As she crashed to the earth Exposed and utterly vulnerable Her secret lives, lies and truths Stained her skin and lay in mounds at her feet Her foes sat in judgment as a jury, But love came . . . with gentle hand...
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for ...
I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought...
He slid a hand over her stomach and down to her mound. He cupped it possessively and was pleased when she sucked in a breath at her unmistakable wetness. "This is mine too." She swallowed hard again but didn't respond. More importantly, she didn't ar...
Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, r...
Summer has weeks left, but once the calendar displays the word “September,” you’d think it was Latin for “evacuate.” I pity them for missing the best weather and the most energized time of year…It’s an extremely impressive display of li...
In January in Northern Russia, everything vanishes beneath a deep blanket of whiteness. Rivers, fields, trees, roads, and houses disappear, and the landscape becomes a white sea of mounds and hollows. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard to see w...
