The young man, hardly more than a boy, who fired the shot had looked at him with an air not of anger but of concentration, as if he were surveying a road,

“Give me some light!” cries Hamle… uncle midway through the murder of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry s… courtesans. Here, as in Denmark, it’s dark at four, and even the mo…

Searching for pillowcases trimmed with lace that my mother-in-law once made, I open the chest of dra… upstairs to find that mice have chewed the blue and white lin…

A fly wounds the water but the wou… soon heals. Swallows tilt and twit… overhead, dropping now and then to… the outward-radiating evidence of… The green haze on the trees change…

There’s just no accounting for hap… or the way it turns up like a prod… who comes back to the dust at your… having squandered a fortune far aw… And how can you not forgive?

Like primitives we buried the cat with his bowl. Bare-handed we scraped sand and gravel back into the hole. It fell with a… and thud on his side,

The dog and I push through the ri… of dripping junipers to enter the open space high on th… where I let him off the leash. He vaults, snuffling, between tuft…

A second crop of hay lies cut and turned. Five gleaming crows search and peck between the rows. They make a low, companionable squ… and like midwives and undertakers

Rebuked, she turned and ran uphill to the barn. Anger, the inn… arsonist, held a match to her brai… She observed her life: against her… it survived the unwavering flame.

Drugged and drowsy but not asleep I heard my blind roommate’s daught… helping her with her meal: “What’s that? Squash?” “No. It’s spinach.”

I washed a load of clothes and hung them out to dry. Then I went up to town and busied myself all day. The sleeve of your best shirt

I am the blossom pressed in a book… found again after two hundred year… I am the maker, the lover, and the… When the young girl who starves sits down to a table

On the way to the village store I drive through a down-draft from the neighbor’s chimney. Woodsmoke tumbles from the eaves backlit by sun, reminding me

It is always the dispossessed— someone driving a huge rusted Dodg… that’s burning oil, and must cost twenty-five dollars to fill. Today before seven I saw, through

The others bent their heads and st… Confused, I asked my neighbor to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeke… who brought raw milk to school fro… herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue…