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In the kitchen the toaster pops too quickly, the water boils away and something burns,      and she turns on herself, a predator breaking a mirror. Door bell jammed with no one there, the screen door sags, its rusted mesh reducing her porch light to squares. People gather and huddle for advice then telephone. Inside, she's…

There was a dance at the black school. In the shot houses people were busy. A woman washed her boy in a basin, sucking a cube of ice to get the cool. The sun drove a man in the ground like a stake. Before his short breath climbed the kitchen's steps She skipped down the…

Spring here before we thought and you wooden with your daughter's death. I count two facts, coincidental, with a child's irrational fear of the dark, the stern fragility of my own daughter after a bad dream. We keep our quiet economies day after day, moving between office, store, and home, all normal as the ordinary…

Crickets in the basement stairwell (funky with leaf-rot, mildew, sweating concrete) screel a daylong prayerwheel with jays and starlings punctuating that chitinous ratcheting. Summer is winding down. On the mantel downstairs a steadier clucking housed in ceramic, and looking like a linoleum-covered Taj Mahal, releases a cogwheel, whirs, bongs, reminds me of Dallie (Miss Valeria…

After a night of rain like a waterfall, The stony lane that winds up Knocknarea Is a runnel of swift water winding downward. You should wear your Wellingtons and carry a stick. The stones are slippery and the dog at the gate Is fierce and requires a cheerful word in passing. The way up is…

The double-barreled twelve gauge that knocked even our father back a step when he fired it; the pump-action twenty-gauge he later gave to me; the pistol (Mother's favorite) we thought was a Yankee's, its notched hammer becoming its rear sight when it was cocked; the damaged Kentucky long rifle; two over-and-under shotgun-rifles; and a thirty-thirty…

Once the world was waiting for a song when along came this. Some said it was a joke funny ha-ha but at the end too lachrymose to last. Others that it was writ holier than thou and should be catechized, then set to turgid dirges, wept over with gnashed fang, wrung palm. The ancient declaimed…

This air is a close shave, slicing across the frozen ponds, scraping chins raw, icicle-edged and keen as stars. Wind meets small resistance, skimming the spiky sedge when such cold hills etch their bulk on polished sky and the men come stamping after the beagles — rabbit-hunters — across the slopes as the sun sets….