It is a soft afternoon. Spring. Blue and pale green. Just a little breeze occasionally laces the silvery warmth of the sun. They are in the yard at the back of the house, standing on the graveled drive that divides the lawn and her flower beds from the working yard of packed dirt and rough…
They say they'll need the dental records to prove he is the same person but I tell them the child that was me has gone no- where to live. He hears his name call ing me out of the darkness; he is this tangled clump of weeds beneath the snow. He comes every- where with…
for R. F. One whose son has died has to forgive the boys who still live, when they come up the street slowly in a ragged group, talking, three with mitts, one with the ball. Should forgive, and does. And a man whose marriage has broken under his hard pressures or hers has to blink…
Her grandmother would put on her glasses to read labels when the girl went to the market with her. The grandmother would read the brand name and the price out loud to the girl. The girl could not read much herself, but sometimes she pretended she could. The grandmother would read a word, and the…
I saw the wind tilt the corn: Will and Humility, just an image. The sugarcane cut at the same height, the field freshly burned smelling of flan, the bittersweet roots in my house.
I thought of the young, who came to me then. I taught them a scheme: I said Appetite, Temperament, Discipline — have the one, follow the other, submit to the third. It's yourself that you remake, I said Yeats said. But first you must have had things happen to you. For your own sake. Appetite,…
Katie had already made plans to go to Texas with the baby. Her going didn't have anything to do with Fisher hitting her. On the other hand, she wouldn't change her plans, even though her eyes were black in the morning; even though he cried and said he'd sat up all night in remorse, thinking…
After Marvell's Latin Though alien to the pleasures of women, unfit to plunge your sickle into the virgin crop and sin in the usual fashion, don't think yourself unmanly! Recognition shall be eternally pregnant by you, you'll ruin nine sisters (having lured them from their mountain), and Echo also — knocked up often — will…
When my Aunt Lera — tiny now, slow moving and slow talking — wanted to tell me about her life, she began by saying, “Curtis and me had just one . . . year . . . together.” Curdiss (the way she says it) was a genial great man by all remembrances of him, and…
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