My father found himself in Boston once, ten thousand myths away from Oklahoma. I think of him standing on the rim of the Atlantic, the horizon vertical as it describes the Upperworld and the Underworld. It was the water that attracted him, as if he were some kin to the Watermonster, as if he’d heard…
For my son I tried to distinguish between personal fear and principle. Now laughter phlegms deep in my throat because I remember the tenuous mud dam in the marsh, only surface tension holding back the black water, and the sleek beaver gliding with a mouthful of sedge and sapling back to the lodge and her…
At your feet, I am a shoemaker’s apprentice, Toxic in a long day of fumes. I’m listening To the fluorescent light come on In April, an Isadora flinging her hot white scarf Across a month mottled by the chemicals Of Daylight Savings Time, in the spokes of the wheels Of hormones turning in the unseasoned…
Shorebirds occupy a patch of sand near the ocean. Eighteen or twenty godwits work, driving their long frail beaks into sand recently made slate-colored by the falling tide. A dozen turn their backs to the surf and walk inland, striding on legs purposeful and thin. Their abrupt walk integrates motions that seem contrary to us,…
They were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That's what she'd thought: Why, he's falling to pieces. The place was called Gary's. "Honey," he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face,…
1. Heroic Measures My friend deals with each new wrinkle in his illness as if it weren't one more step toward the inevitable catastrophe. Always a loner (he claims), he's now tasting the sweetness of friendship for the first time. His thirty-year writing block dissolved: grim, heartbreaking poems—pulled, he says, from the “iron jaws” of…
We never had a cabin in the woods. We never had a yard, a dog, a child. We never lived in the same neighborhood. We never ate, half-naked, on a tiled terrace over the vineyards in Languedoc, or drank milkshakes on the toweled front seat of that fifth-hand Chevy pickup truck whose gears required a…
These fish are older than I. Every morning I learn from the koi how to swim in the wind- ruffled pond: the flow of the tail, the fan of the fins in water, eyes open all ways to the shadow-life moving beyond us. Who knows what goes on under the bridge, the plank where I…
in memory of Alfred Satterthwaite 1. Leave the doors open, the poet says, the whole house open all night, so we may die a little here, in us, and there in him we live a little. Before anyone died here this house stood open. I could see from the darkness Isabel and her sister shelling…
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