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It's got me. Right in the heart all this— a nest— made of broken things— twigs and frayed string; all my talk is a prayer, my eye toward color looks out.

And these others — what are they? Not dolomite, sandstone, shist or calcite. I might include ice — the colorless mineral, if ice stayed ice. But what is this one? Some go nameless, do not look like their pictures. This stingy lump, this once hot magma? This is our whole cause of trouble over arithmetic….

The roof of my ski chalet prays for more snow. Some fell last night but lost its virginity at dawn to a skier from Maine. In the distance a mountain shaped like a breast on its chest of state nurses a cloud. And there is a hawk or a dollar the way it flies— over…

for M. A blue vein over fading bone, I kiss your pulse. Whisper becomes breath near tiny hairs. They're tipped, pinpointed like stars in the kind of night that makes me turn, like earth in a backyard garden in early spring. Nights where we ran. Our legs got tangled. They seemed like white roots—feet dangling….

My grandfather killed a mule with a hammer, or maybe with a plank, or a stick, maybe it was a horse — the story varied in the telling. If he was planting corn when it happened, it was a mule, and he was plowing the upper slope, west of the house, his overalls stiff to…

There was no air and then there was nothing else but air. This is called the filling of the lungs for the first time. The irreversible reverse of this is when my mother calls me and says: The flame fell off the candle just like that. And I say, Just like what? And she says,…

The danger in buying used books is the notes people leave in them— like leaves, brittle, and coy. This one, dated 1935, addressed: DARLING, signed: YOURS; apologizes for not being the French edition, DARLING, on the way to France. You are on your way to the coast. I gave you an oversized Russian history, which…

All day we travel from bed to bed, our children clutching home-made bouquets of tulips and jonquils, hyacinth, handfuls of yellow salad from the fields. In Pittsylvania County, our dead face east, my great-grandfather and his sons facing what is now a stranger's farm. One great-uncle chose a separate hill, an absence in the only…

Do you want me to show you where the dog licked me in the dream? But now that the dream's over the act's invisible, like water flashing its image only when it moves in the stream bed. My cousin took me to the loft of the barn. We walked to the back then he pointed…