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On Being Photographed

—for Bill Aron Iris to iris, all these clicks should parcel out a single ribbon of behavior into chapters of a person. Trying not to try, I try a grin which over-ages into grimace, just as the shutter steps aside. O look, a butterfly, a butterfly! Oh no, too late. Someone, please help me not…

You Could

I didn't know you at first, your face in the mirror instead of mine, that night they put me in your room to sleep. You stared back still young in manner, your smile fixed, but defiant, sensual as the chokecherries red in their tart suspension below in the root cellar where the dusty jars still…

Inheritances

Iva asks me for stories of her father's family. I learned them second-hand -not even a Christain, and not black. I think of a reflective membrane: classes, mirrored, meld. She starts with slavery. The eight-year-old hunkered in the old man's barrel-staves to hide when the blue horseman (she breathed in horse) leaned toward her grandfather…

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…