Still Life
by Tony Hoagland "I'm sorry," the novelist apologized— "my story has a beginning, middle and an end." Then she commenced her explication of the tapestry hanging on the wall. Usually these large, time-faded rectangles of textile woven in the fourteenth century depict some martial glory; two armies bivouacked on a plain beneath the fluttering pennants of their lords; knights galloping on horseback, a sky crisscrossed by arrows. Or sometimes, a damsel and her maids are picking flowers in a glen while from the left, the fiend disguised as an old peddler approaches on a mule— But in this case, a construction site is what we get— giant yellow bulldozers and dirty trucks arrayed around a squared-off hole of scraped-out, reddish dirt— Down in the pit, the foreman is shouting into a shoe-box sized, old-fashioned telephone— He...