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In a few days I identified them— the bright-colored males floating and dipping toward the silver-green hedge rows where their nests teeter. Mostly yellow with black feathers fastened to bodies flying up to the elms, then down: Against batiste clouds, bright topaz stones set into the blue-fabric sky. I drove among them day after day…

In the hushed time before everyone awakes and your hands enter the day with their ceaseless journey between table and sink, you muse over coffee, your own self rising like a flame. Your hands are the lathes and beams of the house with its corridors, its marble steps threading so many stories; the top floor…

I lead him back through the dark wing, past ice-ferned windows to the hearth. For a while he wants to know more about the harpoons and the portraits on the walls. We have come from the grim beach, where edging out on the ice as far as we dared, we could see these windows shining…

I      Migrations I've often seen the kildeer on her grounded nest. In pastures she fluttered, fearful under the rush and noise of my father's machines. I know her circus performance, limping away in a primitive gait, a ruse to save her young. My parents' migration last year from farm to acreage, from stove to silver…

Death makes its sweep over the grass, wind rolled in leaves, a torn wing. Get rid of these cups and saucers, the transistor, the pattern-rugs, this dull heap of necessities I saved up for once. Recycle the poems, clean off the margins of these books, give them back to the poor from whom they came….

Why do the people running from the bomber slow down, look back, and up? Instinct, is it, or a need to glimpse death before it picks you off? What I am seeing must be correct though I can't believe my eyes. Yet, this is docudrama: Poland, WW II, the exodus from village to Warsaw. Surely…

Next to the U.N. compound on the Hill of Evil Counsel where Abraham camped with Isaac on their way to Moriah, Burt has his business. The path the sun makes each day in its blind circle hasn't changed. Except that the sky has less space below. Gift shop and restaurant and goat-hair tents like a…

Freedom is not to be proved but is rather a postulate of action. Thus excellent Berdyaev, who has meant much to me, although I must shake my head and make a face when he undertakes to explain the Holy Ghost. We are unbelievers, Cindy, which may be (I regularly think it is) our misfortune. But…

There is, for me, no such thing as the calm acceptance of desire. — David McAleavey Here on the sill my nature display: one dried rose, crow feathers, a cicada shell (too small a house for the body). One candle, wax curled from when last the wick was lit; you were illuminated by the flickering….