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On nights when the moon seems impenetrable — a locked porthole to space; when the householder bars his windows and doors, and his dog lies until dawn, one jeweled eye open; when the maiden sleeps with her rosy knees sealed tightly together, on such nights the safecracker sets to work. Axe . . . Chisel…

1. Blue, Arrival She arrives but isn't met because he lost the time of her arrival. The blue air of late autumn carries her to the gate, where she turns over her first-class ticket stub to the mute at the ticket window. When he looks up he sees the cobalt stone balancing her middle finger,…

I can clear my name. It was my brother, not me, Who stole your fruit And sold that pop Bottle on your porch, Nickel for his pocket And a jaw breaker that Shattered like a star When Mother got us alone, Naked with our two sins. It was brother, not me. I was saintly that…

On the prairie's edge they buried the president, and you can eat your lunch near his clean, shiny tomb. Still, too many people can't pay their rent. The grasslands beyond once covered with tents. He was born here: for free you can see his house,            its tiny rooms. On the prairie's edge they buried…

in memory of Stephen Blos Although we always come this way I never noticed before that the poplars growing along the ravine shine pink in the light of a winter dawn. What am I going to say in my letter to Sarah — a widow at thirty-one, alone in the violence of her grief, sleepless,…

Mountain blue on the powerline, preening as the big C-119 heads out low over aspen and yellow pine, dragging slurry to Challis, up by Yankee Fork. Idaho is burning. Hot dogs on sale at The Merc; pleasure craft tearing apart the morning lake send osprey wheeling toward deeper woods. Aspen, osprey— haze over half the…

Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night. How gently they sink — white spiders, multi-bladed bleak things, these first, into the nearly mirror of your shovel's surface. It snows, lightly — wide columns of black between each flake but it will snow all night, and thicker. So, you start now…

Sometimes they left me for the day while they went — what does it matter where — away. I sat and watched her work the dough, then turn the white shape yellow in a buttered bowl. A coleus, wrong to my eye because its leaves were red, was rooting on the sill in a glass…