after Rilke It’s time, Lord. The summer was so immense. Now on the sundials your shadows stretch their lengths And across the meadows you release the winds. Command the last fruits to swell with life, Grant them still a few days of florid sun, Press them to completion, and like a hunter Chase the fleeting…
I want to send out this issue of Ploughshares in the high spirits of a Saturday morning in late March. I was alone and took a long walk by myself, but I also carried with me this surprising gathering of writers, this sudden congregation of solitaries, some from different countries, a few no longer living….
Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…
The argument begins. One voice is overcoming another because it’s had it, it’s had enough of all this shit and, unaccompanied, rises to the edge of screaming and past it till the column of air in that throat has nearly abandoned everything under it. Only the vault of the forehead and the bridge of the…
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a boy turns into a daffodil, a girl turns into a tree, a husband and wife turn into snakes and slither away together. The fisherman Glaucus, seeing the fish he’s just caught return to life after he’s spread them out on the meadow, eats one of the strange leaves they’re lying on…
In the van we are as corks in water, bobbing, filled with air. Earplugs jam up my ears with the simple fact that a secret music illuminates the window-better from my side of the inside seat, crammed up against a housewife, cow-like from Des Moines with wads of Kleenex in her fist, arriving with Broadway…
I like to say. I must like to; I say it all the time, leaving parties early, acting put-upon. My little boy sucks blood out of my social life, friendships draining like my hopes to pitch for the Yankees, or find important fossils in my yard. Still, I love knowing my son won’t let sleep’s…
When Anna Green walked into the ballroom for the twentieth reunion of Surfview High in Los Angeles, she did not predict that she would fall in love with Warren Vance. She joined her classmates, in their finery, penned by the hotel"s large glass windows, the sky outside black and the cars on the freeways arranged…
The white mouse went first, pink eyes, pink feet, then the ace of hearts, the quarter and half-dollar, the pigeon, the cat, once the dog, who didn’t howl for a good hour, wherever he was, our old man’s hands faster than our eyes as we lined up on the picnic table seat to…
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