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Sharing spice cake and green tea, Around the round table In the walled garden, The man with the thick black hair And the seated women in blue Have something in common. It's not the rings on their fingers Or the gold in their teeth, Or that they share the same flatwear And plates of bone…

“Before placing me on your shelf, please take me by the feet and give me a few hard shakes to help restore that ‘just made’ look. Thank you.” I have been carrying these instruc­ tions around in my pocket for weeks, pulling them out at odd moments. I found them on the street and I…

So many churches against the sky, a small view beyond where a corner of the sea converges with an even smaller landscape, the spit less than motionless, as in a dream where there's flame but not fire, where a child's cap blows slowly across the street, where the land ends where the street ends, and…

I took for the dawn The steelmills of Gary Burning their corner of the night. But I was wrong. Dead wrong. At four am the sky takes on These willful transformations. To keep awake, I sing off-key The fading staticky tunes, A dj's voice a thousand miles near. My life has never been more In…

What she was resisting in him, or in his habits, or in his world of clothing and cars and books, she could not say. It was just important to not make what it was her own, and the only way to do that was resistance, an energy employed in constant tiny, invisible ways, with the…

           In the fin­      icky world of that small bright-      colored attendant            of the sides of trout, the cleaner-wrasse, an interscale precision means everything. Here's one, pendant      near a gill, and going minutely about the business of dining on some parasitic mite. As wrasse lips sup along trout skin      a lovely fish-to-fish elision occurs:…

“It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it.” — Thoreau Walking home alone at night, I see myself as always walking home alone at night. The wind walks a cloud across the sky on a light leash. The moon trembles. A light goes on somewhere across a street or yard….

In the photograph you and I sit together with identical smiles, each holding a dog by the collar; the ocean is simply backdrop. Marriage, could be the caption, which frees and confines at the same time, as those leashless dogs, now dead, were checked by our hands on their collars. It is probably just coincidence…

I'm a mortgage man and I live on commissions, so this morning's couple, newlyweds, already make the day seem long — the husband ready to question every signature. The wife looks like Mary in Simone Martini's “Annunciation” frowning and gathering her frock as if Gabriel were an unexpected guest, his rippling cape suggesting he was…