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
“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…
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.”
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…
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…
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…
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
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…
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…
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
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 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,
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
The first hot April day the grani… was warm. Flies droned in the gras… When a car went past they rose in unison, then dropped back down.… I saw that a yellow crocus bud had…
