Squinting at Wordsworth's hasty script in dim museum light, I was struck by a lightning flash of memory— I'd read this letter to Coleridge twenty-five years ago with sleet hypnotically tapping my dorm room's panes. Drowsing over The Norton Anthology, dizzy from a bout with flu, I skimmed over William's aches and pains, telling myself…
Our path from the kitchen dwindles in the bales we've piled beside the tilted barn. The scarecrow is askew. A blue bandanna and a shirt bursting with a straw heart resembles everyone we barely knew. And this doesn't scare anybody but us. We work into ruts. They follow the road into town. Here is an…
I am working on a field guide to wind. It will be my labor of love, my legacy. None of us should have to countenance a loss of words, a lack of common names in the face of the world's embarrassing wealth of sundry motions and stirrings. I am working on a source in which…
Every other Sunday we went there. My grandfather opens the trunk and removes a pail crammed full of garden tools, a pair of gardening gloves, in the silence, of course, that a visit with the dead requests of us. He limps to his son's name, kneels down on one knee and grimaces with pain. Inserting…
Until I grew weary of watching the surfacing carp stop just this side of the Milltown bridge to feed on whatever floats, I thought I might die among the immigrant workers, or worse yet, live on forever, nursed like their stagnant steins of beer. The landscape gasped along its barely breathing banks, and I found…
In the years we couldn't live together on land, my family had a houseboat, four families, really, fourteen children among them. I liked to study the adults: one of them, a mortician's son and grandson and great-grandson, who put extra syllables in his words to keep them around longer; one woman, whose legs and hair…
October now, it must be snowing at that dead end where mountains' cupped hands held us up to sky. Here, a surprise snow I watch from your hospital window as I pluck dead blossoms from plants that crowd the sill. What aches as much as anything is the ruse of only weeks ago: you and…
The man next door broods over fences While the trees in his yard are bent double. He stands like that at the window. Mumbling about wives with dust in their noses Who nudge the soil of their pen for grub. They know the scenery never changes, The sun harsh as a fender. His wife has…
Driving from coast to coast down looped highways, I notice how the future we have been speeding towards for years is receding behind us. We must have crossed some boundary and hardly noticed; people we once hurried to greet are standing along the roadside waving goodbye, your grandfather in his ancestral cap, my mother holding…
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