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  • Neversink

    The reservoir was low. Waiting in the bushes for Jack Noble's car, I searched the water's skin for the steeple of the church that lay drowned beneath. My father had explained how the village of Neversink had stood here until the late 1940s, when the river was dammed and the valley became a giant cup…

  • Ghost-Life of a Ring

    Not the one he's wearing in that stopped length of ground, but the one we saw together in the little shop in Oregon—moss agate so green it was nearly black on its silver band. Hard to come across it after, emptied of his hand and watchful. Thinking to surprise its power with treason, I gave…

  • Rosanna

    In the film Baby It's You Rosanna Arquette dances girlish and vampy in front of her mirror. The brass fish on top of the TV curves upward toward some metaphysical sky! It's only yearning. It's only more yearning. Rosanna Arquette . . . Jimi Hendrix says there's a red house over yonder and the guitar…

  • Wishes

    Her car isn't turning over and she wishes She had a new one. Once she had a boyfriend Who wore a silly cap when he fixed things— Sometimes with parts left over—but they didn't Like each other's friends so now he's gone. She wishes things didn't end the way they do. She wonders if it's…

  • On the Passing of Age

    As the soft green of moss covers the gnarled roots of an old banyan, so evening creeps over the folds of my grandparents. Veiled by the dusk from the hurting brilliance of a young world, they sit in undisturbed stillness on garden chairs, side by side. Many who come to see their son, or their…

  • Saratoga Ballet

    Ohhhhhhhhh—I've forgotten the tickets! A cry of distress rises in the blue Honda plodding over a two-lane New Hampshire highway, wedged between the curves of the road and the hard curves of the RVs refusing to move their metal bulk aside. We're halfway there but it would be hours to go home again. We tell…

  • Conclusively

    The night was almost too long to bear. Then there was evidence of mercy—a passing car— milky air—and I could see dry walls & gravel on the way to a highway Atlantic for its grays. Loss is the fulfillment of the Law. Space collected on a long line. I was eliminated as a locus of…

  • Little Wing

    Of all the questions I have been lucky enough to ask, the riskiest, & the one most laughable, wants to know whose feelings are just like my own. Which could easily be a way of asking whose are not. And worse, some feelings, some of my feelings, are like those soft scented brushes flourished hastily…

  • Number Seventeen

    What's Hitchcock up to in this bad movie? The eerie music rises to crescendo Scaring me before there's any danger. A circular staircase spirals into shadow. My heart starts pounding at his grisly tricks— A gunman's silhouette, a mysterious key, A creaking blind, darkness, unknown steps, A cowardly tramp who only wants to flee And…