The grasses in the field have topp… and in places it seems that a larg… absent, animal must have passed th… The hay will right itself if the d… turns dry. I miss you steadily, pa…

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.

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…

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…

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…

Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn,… up the bales as the sun moves down… Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles

Her sickness brought me to Connec… Mornings I walk the dog: that par… is intact. Who’s painted, who’s in… or put siding on, who’s burned the… with lime—that’s the news on Ardmo…

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.”

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,

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

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

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…

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

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,