Sometimes the season changed in th… sometimes the state, but it was al… the Depression, and he was alone i… the train stalled beneath a sky wi… than any he’d seen so far, the fie…

For three years you lived in your… just as it was before she died: yo… portrait on the mantel, her clothe… in the closet, her hair still in t… You have told me you gave it all a…

It began with the first baby, the… disappearing threshold by threshol… milky above the floor only her hee… the ball of her foot perceived. Th… was the crying; it had a low ceili…

Bells sound them from sleep, and t… rise, recite all they have been to… of fire, the beds, nightgowns, the… They’ve practiced this escape befo… and know to close the windows last…

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…

I sent you a list of what I wante… of strangers, or for the fire, the… have handled a dead woman’s posses… them, the clothes still fragrant,… of the body. Or perhaps your lover…

The world has certified itself rid… all but the argument: to eradicate… the small stock of variola frozen, quarantined—a dormancy it has refused, just once, for a woman be…

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

There were warnings: he had, at fo… married; he was too close to his m… calling her by her given name, Man… ah, Manuela —like a lover; even he… had bled, even the walls, giving b…

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

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…

Most of the things you made for me… chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker… away to friends who could use them… be reminded of the hours lost ther… not having been witness to those d…