Article

Traces

Sometimes I have delusions of total recall, tyrannical, crazy. Crazy is what I thought years ago, “You're crazy!” when I built a home over my father's bulldozed house. Nothing's ever lost to me, certainly not the arsonned pieces of that place that erupt like clocks in the rockiness of my yard. Yesterday, yellowed linoleum bloomed…

Long Distance

Here on the phone is Miss Patricia Mitchell Of Nacogdoches, Texas, who is writing her term paper About a poem of mine she wants to ask about. “It's such a privilege, Mr. N,” she says, “Just to pick up the phone and talk to you.” “The others in the class are writing theirs On W…

The Evening of the Stillborn Calf

for Danielle Inseminator, hole-scrubber, midwife, you ache from the scuffle and weight of hauling the troubled cow into stanchions, of thrusting your leek-long arms inside to free the breech that fell against your chest, a steaming new world veined in fading latitudes. Inside the dimly lit birth sac lies the earth-colored calf already weaned from…

Rosie

Something happens in the water: first of all, you are weightless; this is the first thing Rosie noticed, remembers. She learns to swim the ordinary way many of us learn: a small rectangular pool in a day camp in the Indiana dunes, one hour's ride through smelly south Chicago, past the threatening smokestacks of Gary,…

The Plot Behind the Church

Behind Church Ebenezer, moral box,      the steep red washed-out slope           grew scrubby pines. Some pennyroyal stank invitingly,      and vines transgressed the narrow tracks.           It wouldn't be right to go back now— was hardly right to go. . . .                 Ten-year-old Lou      squatting, hesitating, blocked by the grave           spirit of big Dr. Marr, the egg-on-legs…

Patience

They walk into the air at dawn. The man and woman trying to birth the baby. Along the stretch to the lying-in hospital she summons cows she has seen—docile, steadfast in the way sea is always pregnant and ready to give and destroy at the same time. Patience covers her like a shield against women…