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White cottonwood tufts fill the air like moths; we rub our eyes in the filmy atmosphere thick with white dreams, while down the road at the Sagebrush Inn, a Seeing Eye dog sleeps beneath the piano where his mistress practices Linda Ronstadt's greatest hits. Afternoon. The room is empty except for the bartender swatting at…

1. Two men, doubtless brothers, both huge and with the same blank judicious face, slump on a baggage cart. Near them a decapitated deer, tied to another cart. Sag of heavy meat, blood stench, a pool of blood widening on the station floor. Pay attention, hisses the mind, a lesson here. And it's true, in…

after Lewis Hine Maybe her crossed black and white eyes wept, as each acceleration of the immense cotton lyre deafened her. Maybe the voice and face of Jesus comforted her breathing, in the mill's fire- inhibiting drenched air. What's clear is this: dazed, grateful, she stood one day at the picket gate, just there, smiling…

Three deer stare into the dark rooms as if I had something they could take back with them. Opaque at the window, I breathe with the house. Now they dent the thick-ribbed ice with their fine hooves for apples preserved like rubies under glass. They are simple as monks gathered in the orchard after vespers,…

     High above, the flock hones itself to winter leanness, a plow. The point enters spilling its message.      When one in that two-strand of dark moves out I'm uneasy until      the others regroup, enfold it. There is no possibility of loss, the community      knows where it must go. Threaded, no one can fall as it heads…

My friends, we'll each receive a special steel prosthesis, and walk upright! We'll erase this stupefying cuticle, and feel! Our fluids will move through us like a kiss, like a soft light inside our nakedness, where nothing was but excrement and terror, made worse by the nice doctors—Was that us, that bad child making faces…

Kneeling in the dark street I gathered the dog's body against my chest and his cobalt eye rolled forward, sightless as a doll's. Afterwards in the changed rooms his shadow curled his taste and smell on every chair. In the desert, a starving coyote rips a chicken from my neighbor's coop. My neighbor honors him…

Coastal rain, an iron sky. Granite mainland, granite island. It's too cold, I'm too cold, to row across to the mainland. The pickup needs an inspection; I ought to row over across and drive her to Gray for a sticker. Let it wait. There's still time. There's time this morning to read the whole day,…