Nights standing in a field or sleeping under the stars, I sense that one of those pebbles of light must be signaling me from deep space. I know this is no more than my own longing cast like fishing line into the depths of another kind of ocean, and that my aloneness is reflected in…
At sixteen, I worked after high school hours at a printing plant that manufactured legal pads: Yellow paper stacked seven feet high and leaning as I slipped cardboard between the pages, then brushed red glue up and down the stack. No gloves: fingertips required for the perfection of paper, smoothing the exact rectangle. Sluggish by…
I want to talk to ghosts. Where are they in this county. Over the red grass, under the rancher motels. To freefall through their gorgeous startling souls, released from time. My rearview mirror goes dark. I’m not afraid. Death is the instant of perfected memory. It seems just like the present tense, just like life,…
It was older than the red barns, older than the frog pond for the cattle, than the road up Clark Hill, and the live oak colonnade leading to the rich man's brasses. Older too than ox blood and the idea of honor, or the dream of dominance. It was a stillness of light pouring in,…
Not only what lasts, but what applies over time also. So maybe, for all my believing, not you, on either count. Any more than this hand where it falls, here, on your body; or than your body itself, however good sometimes at making—even now, in sleep—a point carry. Not this morning, either, that under the…
I am struggling with the first line. No, those words will not fit in my mouth. Language is neutral, the speaker is not. I can start fire with words, the pen is like a boxer’s gloves. I could dance this tropical dance with you, but my eyes are watching the lines carved underneath your eyes…
I am the tuck of turquoise water, the slap of spray on ocean rocks. I am the boat, the effort of her engines, the voice of the captain pointing out the woman whipped against the cliff by wind, her red cap. I am the trails of bindweed at her feet, the labyrinth of roots. I…
Water as green as the pair of pickerel nibbling on the matter raised by my feet. The bottom: mulch, scrap limbs, snowmelt springs, and nothing too large or deep. Drift across, flat on your back, a mote. “One, two, three,” says mother to her boy as she heaves him by his foot over her shoulder,…
Far from Puebla and Michoacán men wake to pick peaches and beans. Light rolls out its bolt of cloth. Yard sales, craft shows, the six-pack loneliness of rural towns. On either side of I-95, going to Sonora, butterflies don’t care who drives more than fifty-five for a cheap pint of faith in the jackpots. Mars…
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