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Let's say the residents had other engagements. They've gone off playing flutes made from wingbones of the golden eagle. They've ascended to the abalone heavens, and left alone, we prettify the long ago. Aren't gardens most fetching when nobody's home? When you can track the sunflower's tambourine face twirling toward the sun. The Anasazi angled…

I can't help but believe the killdeer, so deftly has it led me, dragging its own wings away from a poorly hidden nest before clenching back into flight, and I can't help but believe in a love that would make itself so vulnerable for its young. It is hard to understand, but only by leaving…

for Margitt The name of the boy is Michael, who rows, his sister mans the sail. The storm, the boat, the chorus' call for the boy to row it ashore, hallelujah, slowly sung over. We hear children master this gospel and I wish all sight of the shore the storm estranges that brother and sister…

This is only a short trip but the horses don't know that blindfolded beneath the deck. They stand tense and steaming, I know their eyes are walled and bright beneath the cloth. Their hard breathing is my asking what should I do? and telling myself nothing. The ship's horn, a sudden shift; it doesn't take…

“You can't step into the same river twice“ —Heraclitus Sometimes you step into a river twice and it's the same river. The sky leans down just to show the importance of sky, Boys on the bridge are throwing rocks, carelessly, at elusive carp in that changeless river. They do not think of the love they…

He slapped her—just once, not hard—when she fainted, and it's the shocked, ashamed way he tucked his right hand inside that pouch between the calf and thigh the body forms when it crouches that makes me sure they have never as much as thought of hitting or getting hit for pleasure, in their secret life….

From the train among row after row of empty buildings you see a single curtained window, an orange bottle on the sill, and a small child's face watching sparks from the tracks. You can only start to answer this after you've passed it, when the train is already pulling into another town where another child…

Folding the old monopoly board I straighten the piss-yellow $500 bills. If this were real . . . we thought as kids. That sense of possibility is gone though artifacts remain: the dirty string that knotted charms — flat iron, silver shoe, the choo-choo I might have ridden anywhere. These rest in a junkyard sofa…

There was the bank and mud sloped into a sandbar and what do you care? Spare hooks in a shirtpocket, nightcrawlers crammed in soil in a canning jar. Supper, among your mother's family, was over. Her sister went on and on about how poor the past was. Their father's overalls, grime, cuffs futile to try…