When the only ladies’ dress shop c… she was left on the street for tra… one arm missing, lost at the shoul… at the hip. But she was wearing a… and blonde wig, so they helped the…

The girls sit before the assignmen… blocks of salt—and from tall, prec… look down into blank planes of pos… though, the only choice is to carv… smaller. So they begin. Rough chu…

She had been a late and only child… already old and set; none of us ha… wanted to go inside that hushed ho… and play with her, her room too ne… We did encourage her later, though…

The household sells in a morning,… they cannot let the house itself g… the near-nothing it brings at auct… the children, all beyond their mid… carry her back to it, the mortgage…

How she must have dreaded us and o… than we hated practice, the lesson… her arthritic hands, the metronome… to us about the history of the pia… spinet and player had come across…

That summer, we did not simply wal… the valley of the shadow of death;… orchestrating funerals for the ano… found dead: a drowned mole—its sma… still pink—a crushed box turtle, g…

The forecast had not predicted it, and its beginning, a calming, rumb… and pleasant lightning, she welcom… of rain. Then as night came she he… relapse, slide backward into winte…

I have asked him to tell it—how he heard the curing barn took hour… to burn, the logs thick, accustome… to heat—how, even when it was clea… was lost, the barn and the tobacco

It was fifty cents a game beneath exhausted ceiling fans, the smoke’s old spiral. Hooded lig… burned distant, dull. I was tired,… insisted on one more, so I chalked

It was first dark when the plow tu… Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-rud… but itself, the tendon’s bored eye… a ponderous needle. And yet the po… of one end dared what was undone

This is the season of her dying, a… have kept it, I find, underneath t… in a box filled with photographs—h… of that last year, the calendar a… she did not intend to write. In th…

I think by now it is time for the… I imagine the field, the one above… house we rented, has lain in conva… long enough. The hawk has taken ba… above new grass, and the doe again…

The camera is trained on the door,… in the frame, only the dog sleepin… finally, I see this was to surpris… filming your arrival, the dog’s de… six years distant, can this seem s…