We two sit on our bed, you between my legs, your back to me,… slightly bowed, that I may brush a… your hair. My father did this for my mother,

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the joy at the bend in the road where we t… signs painted Peaches.

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots… through the bare rooms over my hea… opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an… What could he possibly need there…

When I lay my head in my mother’s… I think how day hides the stars, the way I lay hidden once, waiting inside my mother’s singing to hers… how she carried me on her back

In the dark, a child might ask, W… just to hear his sister promise, An unfinished wing of hea… just to hear his brother say, A house inside a house,

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s… The garden is bare now. The grou… brown and old. What is left of th… in the maples at the corner of my eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.

That scraping of iron on iron when… rises, what is it? Something the w… quit with, but drags back and fort… Sometimes faint, far, then suddenl… beyond the screened door, as if so…

While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sl… for breakfast, before the birds,

Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I’ve found in my mouth,

He gossips like my grandmother, th… with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he

We come to each other exactly at the center, the spine of ample fire, and suffe… to be revised. Stay with me.

Forgive me for thinking I saw the irregular postage stamp of dea… a black moth the size of my left thumbnail is all I’ve trapped in t… There is no need for alarm. And

Because this graveyard is a hill, I must climb up to see my dead, stopping once midway to rest beside this tree. It was here, between the anticipat…