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     A woman prepared a mouse for her husband’s dinner, roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.     At table he uses a dentist’s pick and a surgeon’s scalpel, bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler’s loupe . . .      Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter mouse, mouse sauteed in its…

The front a mirror. The back a picture of the Garden of Eden. A strange find of the old master of glass.

This lake is not a concept but the home of fishes. Slowly the ducks go by. The Christ is not a concept but one of these ducks. Which one?

    An elephant went to bed and pulled a crazy quilt up under its tusks.     But just as the great gray head began filling with the gray wrinkles of sleep it was awakened by the thud of its tail falling out of bed.     Would you get my tail? said the elephant to another…

These calm days of September with their sun. It’s time to harvest. There are still clumps of cranberries in the woods, reddening rosehips by the stone walls, hazel nuts coming loose, and clusters of black berries shine in the bushes, thrushes look around for the last currants and wasps fasten on to the sweetening plums….

The baseball is also known as the fruit whereby man lost his innocence. No one shouts, “Throw the old peach.” It is the Old Apple and when the air here greens and violets dab purple, while the leaves still keep their pure forms before ravenous generations of insect commence to ravage, the Apple is thrown….

A child was taught To be a gravedigger. Pail and plastic shovel Waiting on the meadow. Don’t leave for tomorrow What you can do today! A bit of daylight still left Among the evening configurations. With his stooped shoulders He looks employed in the obvious way: Dark, damp clods of earth flying . . ….

The dead come, looking for their shoes. It is all right if we can’t find them: it was only the dark, inside, they wanted. It is all right. They can be the shadow of a boulder, or the oak leaves falling, one by one. There have been so many of them, and so few of…