drmstream[writing]

In the dream the dog walked to my chair and looked at me. I had a towel wrapped around my chest and was wear­ing a skirt made from banana peels. “Are you pick­ing up the chicken parts for the replace­ment poul­try?” the dog asked. I crawled into a cave where seven bats were play­ing musi­cal chairs using […]

I’ve started from no place. I am going to no place. What occu­pies me in the mid­dle, the con­cen­trated effort of climb­ing from one rung to another, the aware­ness of the aching in my calf and shoul­der, the chaf­ing on my palms, the dizzy­ing dis­tance of every­thing, can not occupy me at the end. At the end there […]

The rumor spread across cam­pus like the brush fires that sparked dur­ing dry fall after­noons at the mouth of Bloody Run: some­one had got a girl up the lane preg­nant. The Head­mas­ter knew. They were going to get expelled. At first we thought it was Sam. He had a ground floor sin­gle and he took […]

This is how we age, the way Fall unfolds, not all in a rush, but in pieces and slow, at night when we sleep and the body cools. We’re young still in parts, the ver­i­ta­ble green shoots of youth sprout­ing through the enflamed palette of age, the stag­ing of decay. This is our most profound […]

I. I called you as soon as I got back to my apart­ment.  You picked up.  My liv­ing room was hot.  I couldn’t breath.  You didn’t say any­thing.   The silence was like dark blotches of ink.  The phone line crack­led. “I’m com­ing back down.” “You don’t have to.” “I want to.  Will you be there.” “You don’t […]

When I stand on the hill and look down the river, I feel like I can breath again. The houses, I hardly notice them, I don’t notice them, I don’t know how to explain it you. I don’t notice them because I know what is inside them. I feel it, the rough wood chairs and […]

The film­maker Erroll Mor­ris asked the ques­tion on Twit­ter, “I am inter­ested in assem­bling a col­lec­tion of sto­ries of peo­ple destroyed by read­ing (Any sug­ges­tions?)” and I wanted to make a smart con­tri­bu­tion but couldn’t shake a faint mem­ory of some­one wrapped in a blan­ket wan­der­ing Easton’s Beach with a tat­tered copy of Far From […]

Here, Saripu­tra, form is empti­ness and the very empti­ness is form; empti­ness does not dif­fer from form, form does not dif­fer from empti­ness; what­ever is form, that is empti­ness, what­ever is empti­ness, that is form, the same is true of feel­ings, per­cep­tions, impulses and consciousness.

At Storm King, the unpar­al­leled sculp­ture gar­den in New York’s Hud­son Val­ley, an decay­ing stone wall wound through the old dairy fields. The sculp­tor Andy Goldswor­thy over two sum­mers in 1997 and 1998 directed the struc­ture of a new stone wall along the path of the old one. The new wall has a for­mal ele­gance that […]

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do any­thing really good. — William Faulkner I’m fin­ish­ing a story right now that is frus­trat­ing me. First, I should be work­ing on the long project.  I’ve set myself a dead­line and need to keep on it. Sec­ond, the story is […]