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Here is dill and its sweet scent rising off the peas steaming in their white bowl. This is the language of fiction, a picture shaped with our wits, an energy that asks our hands to cup water from the cold faucet, to wash children, to do the tasks we set for them. Here's another story…

The clockwork can no longer while daily the wind moves down the avenue. Handkerchiefs walk like hands—there is absolutely nothing I can hide from you. Already the pigeons blow up in fuliginous blooms, I have named them all Hilary. Watch, they will crowd back on the solitary timepiece. At arm's reach angels sit concerto, and…

I drive peculiar routes to come this way. Just yesterday, I coasted near to see the house accented by some candlelight at dusk, the hour when foolish dinners have begun. I didn't care. Behind an unfamiliar fence, the grave was there with all its morbid qualities unchanged. Add to this an element of rain, a…

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before its flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop, because a storm is coming, when there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very…

Of course we always want more than we have, or less: the house in Maine, all windows, and the water, like a pencil turned on its side and pressed across the page. In the dark night, we want to be a flashlight or a cool breast for a hot baby. Someone else's baby: Mozart at…

A thrilling wilderness of bio- morphic script, you said my letters scared you. And it's even worse in person: pink oil of lipprints, unnervingly organic Hi's, those kisses like collusions. For a moment we vibrate like underwater stones. What is this windfall? We are not easily becalmed. How you pull back as if to deflect…

(For F.W.) You have decided to live. This is your fifth day living. Hard to sleep. Harder to eat, the food thick on your tongue, as I watch you, my own mouth moving. Is this how they felt after the flood? The floor a mess, the garden ruined, the animals insufferable, cooped up so long?…

“Beauty is to expose the cruelty in men” — David Smith Dangerous, the air we breathe, the oily, roiling earth, the skin we touch in desperate sex and clinging. A woman in love is a pitiful thing, so huddled into herself and hoping she'll fit. Neither act of will nor imagination can change this. Locked,…

(To Hank) As sun tugs earth into an orbit, fattens apples to red spheres, as darkness holds the dyes in cloth or paint keeps iron assets intact, you preserve, you make fables from the random. What breaks without changing doesn't signify: a china cup to china chips—that can be fixed. But paper flaming to something…