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I first danced there on the warm linoleuin of our kitchen in my father's arms. Our hands clasped, feet scraping across the floor. I felt so comfortable with this, my first dance— as he led, and the music played on. The needle scraped in the final groove. I felt his grip release, our blood flow…

His wife folds her death bed—the waft of the sheets flutters through her lips. His name shifts on her face light as sun. Her snow-white mind is winter. This winter he gave himself absence. In the half- empty bed he knows his body. He whispers, “Life of the past.” He takes her to the north…

1 I know all that's wrong with coveting your neighbor's life, but I want the one I've invented for this couple in front of me in line at the license bureau. I can see the pulse in his temple, the faint down along her jaw. But I can't understand their constant murmurings, so practiced they…

1. If under the full snow moon you can keep breathing—I'll be glad if I'm alive tomorrow, I said to myself driving the back roads in yet another storm. I had never seen such poverty—Mae stoking her stove from six in the morning until late at night. “Kind of lonesome, don't you know, alone, the…

The water on the lake is still as love become permanent desire, like oil. The fields for hundreds of years fields of grass, potatoes, sugarbeets or wheat, are a graveyard where the stones look southward in a soft curve and the country road is a suburban street. Here my father lies dead by his own…

When you collapsed on the roof in the heat I dragged you down the shingles, the cedar splitting, your blunt fingers and hands with their old bashes and scars, thudding against my arms, banging the wood. The sky that clear blue space in the flame backed off like an open palm.            I slid you…

1 This morning, everything went with the tide: Deirdre's doll, Heather's hat, the Meow-Mix cats, all but this surge inside, nerve-sheaths white, blue-green, my ramrod spine loose, flexible at last. How to possess ourselves at 5 a.m.? When they come to me feverish and pocked, I tell them to brush their teeth, gnaw on a…

Our faces pored over his grave in benevolent incomprehension. He swims in his coffin like a diver watching the surface above—our faces small as petals breaking in the change of seasons. Our silence blooms rust and yellow, desperate as chrysanthemums. The cooler weather wears the bones in the body down to the heart.