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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 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…

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…

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…

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…