I'm not sure where it all began. Perhaps it was "Hure, hare, hure, commencement," a game my sisters Debo and Decca organized when we were quite small. Or, I should say, when they were quite small. I was never small and they always organized all the games. I don't know. Perhaps they were cleverer than…
In that field is open summer. Under a copper-beech three mares graze almost without motion, and the small wind that turns the leaves through the dimensions of gold light does not lift their manes. One sorrel, the chestnut half in shadow, the white in sun who snuffs at a pink-flowered weed, arching down her neck:…
Pigs loom, grunting by the shed, embarrass the decent farmer, lathered in his bathroom window. Dipped in pine-tarred water at 158°, the bleached carcasses shave so easily, bristles falling over the blade. He was beaten once for tossing diseased chickens into the pen when he'd been told to bury them. Pigs develop tastes. He can't…
Imagine a mathematic of superstition, a logic to the blue and the salt, variables of water and wind, a copper-colored ring around the two-faced moon. Imagine a formula or being at home in your life. Home could be next door to Coalman's Loam & Gravel where on Sundays Baptists gather to praise the word of…
The day after Thanksgiving my mother was arrested outside the front doors of the J.C. Penney's, Los Angeles, and when I went to get her I considered leaving her at the security desk. I thought I wanted her in jail. I wasn't surprised – I'd known all along she was a thief. Small things: a…
In spring, when the earth turns to food and the mares thicken with what they have kept hidden through winter in their bodies and between her legs weeks early the sac grew of the thin bluish milk that is the first need, in the last days she'd come reluctantly, if then, to the wooden barn,…
Bachelors wives, and maids children, be well taught. — Thomas Heywood One by the papermill, one by pleurosis, this one is learning by harrow and plow. So frail the vessel for lessons of weight, so provident are the ways. Annabel watches the rags in their stew, and see what a mill can make of the…
It's the season before winter. The fish are slippery without their skins. Scaler in hand, toeing the dock's edge, Your back to the lights of Labrador. Summery fish are leaping to rise One above the other. In your dreams you are always Losing your footing, and, Waking to this sign of your sins, Certain only…
Wanting to try her hand at literature, she had taken it into her head to fashion willy-nilly novels, letters, comedies, and other nonsense like that. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, IX In 1955, two hundred years after Madame Louise d'Epinay began planning an autobiographical novel, it was finally published in its original form. Seeing an earlier version,…
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