The Hooked Guide Mark
The harbor smelled of pitch, frying chickpeas, wet wool, and the clean insult of salt. Qart-Ḥadašt announced itself before dawn the same way it had five years ago: rope creaking in blocks, donkeys obj...
Continue readingThe Crooked Label
Paris remains determined to look like Paris even when it has taken a wrong turn at some minor clerk’s desk a century ago. The omnibuses still groan over the stones. The cafés still steam at the window...
Continue readingThe Donkey With The Basket Lid
The pyramid is still a raw mountain today, not yet the clean triangle later artists will sell to schoolchildren and souvenir buyers who never had to drag limestone in August. From where I stood at the...
Continue readingThe Red Coin Under The Ashtray
The first thing Osaka did this morning was fog my glasses and make my shirt collar cling to the back of my neck. The second thing it did was offer me an exact minute for everything I might enjoy, endu...
Continue readingThe Cartoon Compost Tin
Bristol looked convincingly like Bristol this morning, which is to say it was doing its best to lean uphill while pretending that damp stone is a civic achievement. The buses growled along Baldwin Str...
Continue readingThe Blue Barrel
By the time I reached Olot this morning, the volcano cones were green in the flat Catalan light and the bakeries had already begun losing their first heat. The town looked almost indecently normal at ...
Continue readingThe Small Iron Awl
The Rhône is doing what large rivers do when Rome has important plans: rising, muttering, and carrying inconvenient brown water past men who would prefer it to behave like a road. All morning the quay...
Continue readingThe Knife Pledged For A Lamp
Bolghar showed itself first by smoke, dogs, and the blunt practical geometry of winter roofs. The Volga lay under dirty ice beyond the landing, not a clean sheet but a trampled gray road with sled rut...
Continue readingThe Sock Wrapped Salve Tin
The first shells woke the windows before dawn. They did not break them, not the ones in the room where I had been put to wait, but they made each pane give a small hard complaint in its wooden frame. ...
Continue readingThe Plain New Knot
I reached the upper terraces before the morning cloud had finished tearing itself on the hills. Monte Albán sat above the valley with the plain spread below in green and brown squares, maize leaves fl...
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