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Hesitate? The wide long river’s Extravagance Decrees the boundaries of my insouciance, confides how Little, how hourly less, it cares For the parallel blunders of its Parallel banks, twin antinomies, Wind-wrinkled water’s edgy lapping, Mammered quibbles among pebbles, Clishmaclaver, quaggy and wearisome Thoughts of no stature, Windlestraw, zilch-billows, death- Blusters. Lord lift me above my…

Tuned for the big spenders. Hardly an unbroken bone in your body. Now you know why your mama wanted to give you just one kind scar in the right place. You're in these snapshots dancing the cha-cha, doing the dog with a sailor from Chattanooga. The good life poured from a green bottle, a cigar…

More than the rich white meat or the feathers Grandma might use to make a hat, there was some thrill in killing a gorgeous thing, even in simply slamming to a halt the car and all our desultory attention — then the shot, and burnt trace of it, smell that tastes of blood in your…

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.