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In a New Climate

In the teapot, a few black leaves soak up the groundswell, spout like a gutter, a bronze warp. And the teapot's roof, nearly Byzantine suffers neither the climate nor its weather, never worries about winter, but only the elements our eyes give to it, a cautionary glance lest it fall inward, and shatter like so…

Homage

           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:…

The Life I Am Living

“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….

Mortgage Business

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…

Carnies

That's what we went for, Holly and I, not for the rides or the games we couldn't win. What were we then, fourteen, fifteen, wearing cut-offs and our brothers' workshirts. Holly tossing her hair as we walked down the midway, her talking big and me saying nothing, a half step behind her. But don't you…

Paris

Forty years later she is still the girl Who lusted after Paris from the Left Bank, And called from Montmartre, Where is Paris? The boulevards did not convince her; Those Frenchmen and women Marched like a scene from a film, Black-and-white, moving unevenly, A little grainy. In no bistro, in no Metro station Was the…

Fire Ants

She had kept the bottle stuck down inside a basket of clothes that needed ironing, and throughout the course of the day whenever she had a chance to walk through the back room where the basket was kept, she would stop for the odd sip or two. By the middle of the afternoon, she had…