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The breakers had dredged a trough along the water's edge, shelved stones, the way they shelve sand and a wader, stepping down, stumbles and sinks to his waist. Each stone was rolled round, colored eggshell, ebony or brick, white as bleached clam or pink quartz ribboned green. She hefted their palm-sized weights as she lay…

This black hole is empty not just of eyes, voice, hands, but of the least stirring in the air. It is a cave so dark and still there is not the slightest flutter of even one bat's wing.

They dally on succulent fields of ferment while days pitch away. Their jaws move in circles like a woman's seasoned fingers delving bins at a rummage sale—both know green's secret outposts in dark corners. And noses stroke the ground, hothouse breath coaxing tubers to curl up another year. They have the privilege of this valley….

Too soon she is the grandmother, able to live only for others, when what she wants is to be left alone. This one, Tuesday's child, it's not that she wants to die, nor does she live on memories. For her, the past exists no more than the future. She waits and watches the body decay,…

In the public garden that hangs in the air above the Pont d'Avignon behind the Palais des Papes, where seven popes ruled from their fortress, you hold my arm, while the wind, the mistral, lifts the purse from my side, my skirt above my thighs. But here, no one looks and if I hold your…

Riding down the shallow rocky Sheepscot the trick is to stay centered on the rubber raft. You have to watch out for crazy currents that will hang you up on hairy boulders. Falling off is not the problem— it's the getting back on with the rear end of the raft swinging away like a slippery…

Already the leaden sky dissolves and changes into a red-orange plume on water— as if our low-gear motor mixes magnificent pigments that funnel in, then diffuse. And even though we home in on a pocket of river-must where the anchor will take hold, the sun in our wake, that leavening distance so slow in coming…

Red snapper with tabouli, I tucked the napkin into my drink. Smooching broke out at the next table. I am talking a luncheon language to a Lebonese architect posing as a recently divorced Finn in the Peachtree Center. Red snapper, until the species cannot afford summer vacations, lunching on the bottom, farming among the lower…

Blue animal in a blue affluence, silver-blue ocean mammal pointing in a green-blue sea towards a thin sparkle, the far surf in the sun. You're one with an intimate language: the possible loneliness of no-one-to-talk-to. Swimming out, somersaulting in the salt, your destination: lone dolphin, X, meet fellow speaker, Y.