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after James Agee that couple on the road could no more slow their hearts, slough their fear          than could you doff your privilege, un- lace the corset of skin that cuts you to the quick so here you are in the thick of it the sun-bleached air the hard-scrabble beauty of…

          Is the sleeve of that racist century as wrought or gold-chained     as Henry VIII’s who strolls in and says          I’m what matters,               intestines sagging, the regal spittle     bound to stick on dog fur? That’s where…

Now that archeologists can agree That the fall of Jericho is a fiction (The walls not breached, the houses not burned), We can hope the same for the painful passage About the Amelikites, how the tribe is slaughtered On Jahwe’s orders, as Samuel reports them, “Men and women, children and little babies,” Put to the…

after Elizabeth Bishop She painted interiors mostly, domestic spaces, slightly old-fashioned, simple and practical, places you could make-do comfortably a month or two, an uncle’s cabin with its potbelly stove, a kettle, a spindle chair, flowers like pussy willows branching from a water glass and, strangely,—in the air a mobile—a Calder turning like thought, like…

What I see in one eye and not the other. A moon that slices away at the dark. The past and what’s coming. Unlike the little hunchbacked shrew hopping mindless across the road. Or crickets, eating anything in their path, gardens, grass, each other. We’re different. We anticipate. For the others, it’s the music without…

You oughta burn those blankets outside in a barrel, is what the undertakers of that town told us as they were going, because of how he died, though by then blankets were the least of what we’d handled.                                  …

Sun first appears as a spot on the kitchen wall. Then a branch from the back yard breaks in every inch lit by dew. Despite us, hunched shadows, our dust rises sparkling. Quick! The wet negative dries.

Then, he held me there as if stunned, the figure      who had appeared saying           this is the edge between what is and what is not. On one side was the forest in all its complex depth and verdancy,      on the other side stretched the field,  …