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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.

Roblinus is our leading lit- erary pot-shotter (iconoclasm detoxifies a culture and Rob- linus is already a cultural monument) since he is virtuous the pot he shoots can hardly be grass so let us say that the shot must come from a pot which is used to relieve his (distress).

Now, at the moment of death, your body reappears everywhere it’s been, so all its positions are simultaneous, united indistinguishably in a single mass that extends from the place you were born to where you’ve ended up. No one else is sensitive enough to you to see this. Because the path of your body intersects…

“Girl, it’s taken everything in me just to keep myself breathing.” Half then all our chickens picked off by coyotes, the pig gut he salted with strychnine, meant for coyotes, eaten by his own dogs, the burial of the dogs useless against the coyotes, the reburials, the coyote hunters shooting out goats, his stallion breaking…

after Hardy Why would she come to him, come to him, in such disguise to look again at him— look again— with vacant eyes— and why the pain still, the pain— still useless to them— as if to begin again— again begin— what had never been? *     *      * Why be persistently hurtful— no truth to…

On one side a picture: tears boiling out of eyes that reflect flames. And a caption: “The frontier of the damned.” On the other side a note: “Thanks for the funeral. I’ve just arrived. Isn’t this beautiful? But it hurts. Write.”

Ron’s eager chainsaw and the firs falling combined their uproar with such startling silences there was no sense pretending to work at my desk. Granting the need, but unwilling to watch, I freed up all six culverts instead, clogged since spring when last the road was scraped— one of them so buried I had to…

He is thinking of everyone he ever knew in no order, lets them come or go as they will. He wonders if he’ll see them again, if they’ll remember him, what they’ll do. There’s no surprise now, not the unexpected as it had been. He’s agreed to being more settled. Yet, like they say, as…