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The Women Wait

I remember Yiannoula bringing huge balls of fresh cheese to our house, cheeses larger than soccerballs. They were wrapped in cloth, and fat drops of milk would stain the flagstones as she carried them across the courtyard to where my grandfather waited, near the door of the storeroom. Half of it would be sliced and…

George Annand 1890-

“More delicate than the historians’ are the map- makers’ colors.” —Elizabeth Bishop “We were crazy, me and Red, Used to take rifles to the fields and shoot at animals, Squirrels and rabbits mostly. My old mother was sure we’d kill somebody — “My father was the only doctor In the whole place, for hundreds of…

Silver Poplars

That winking, glimmering like the wings      of starlings in their dark flock, wheeling            into the last light, into the light breeze; that shivering like lake ripples, like sequins      on a black lace veil that half reveals            some face which, loveliest, lies beneath; that soft shade we once sat to read in      afternoons, and…

The Sea Tooth

“Pelly found a narwhal tooth washed up to shore. With his friend Sheppard, they were going to try sell it at a Hudson Bay Co. store.”      How much? “Maybe two hundred, maybe three. Anyway they set out. Soon a third man appears in the distance. He walks toward them. Pelly says, `He wants something.’ Sheppard…

Das Ewig-Weibliche…

My cousin Annie who adored the internal combustion engine slapped four-barrel carbs on her sea-green ’55 DeSoto and outdragged every leather boy in town. As soon as winter left for good she stripped to the waist to polish every inch of chrome until the sweat raced down her small important breasts and glittered like the…

The Last Time

Three years ago, one last time, you forgot Yourself and let your hand, all gentleness, Reach to my hair, slipping down to caress My cheek, my neck. My breath failed me; I thought It might all come back yet, believed you might Turn back. You turned, then, once more to your own Talk with that…

Drowned In Air

`I wasn’t just seeing things.”      Never though that. “It was this old woman walking the beach. She was searching under everything. Under a broken pier slat washed in. Under rocks, under sea weeds. Sifting up sand in her hands. As if she was looking for the beach itself. Sometimes on her knees. For a seal’s…

Car Country

This is no way to live, unscrewing the carburetor each morning, sticking a screwdriver into its butterfly valve to let the air in manually. You could stick all I know about cars into a thimble: my car is sick, it’s old and it’s rusted. And although this Japanese vehicle is not my own personal body…