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Birds, Beasts, Flowers

The farm market, earlier all leaf lettuce and sugar peas, has gone to parsnip, potatoes, winter squash. And apples, dropping on the roadway, mixing with days of rain into thick slush as V. approaches the green market kiosk. FARM-FRESH EGGS PIE APPLES POTATOS The soft-spoken farmer follows where she points, bags beets, eggplant. He hands…

In The Mist

On cool, damp evenings at the end of July, you can walk into a mist; and the mist seems to disappear — from the dirt road; from the hill; from the trees. . . But in the full moon, you can begin to see it again — it gets closer, leaving a ring of clearness…

The Pre-Rusted Skyscrapers

shaped like megaliths, also like tombstones, their sharp shoulders making the air emptier, clearer, and turning the day like a Monet sequence: gray- blue, shimmering, surfaceless, when between you and the morning light; almost haystacks on a mid- summer mid-afternoon, then rusting in earnest, grieving watchfires, into the dark. . . And the planes always…

The Coggios

It is spring, and flamingoes return to the Coggios' lawn, along with the virgin in her sky-blue robe. Inside the miniature picket fence, daisy pinwheels are spinning; a pair of young deer graze and listen. I listen too, imagining the voices of the Coggios calling to me from out behind the house where they take…

Accomplice

1 Getting out after reading, or writing, late — or was it waiting for a call? — past the windows where, on hot nights, they don’t pull all the shades all the way down. . . (I walk by slowly, twice.) Then up a darker, more private street. My footsteps echo. Echo? Someone else’s feet,…

On Ralph Hamilton

Adorno writes of Stravinsky: "Stravinsky's imitators remained far behind their model, because they did not possess his power of renunciation, that perverse joy in self-denial. . . . To a very large degree taste coincides with the ability to refrain from tempting artistic means." Ralph Hamilton's paintings exhibit to an extraordinary degree the "power of…

Household

Here came Nathalie: forty-one, agile of body, angular of face, with large blue eyes under a flap of greying bangs, dressed at the moment in a woolen bathrobe with threadbare piping, she was carrying her firstborn baby, a daughter, down the upstairs hallway for an early morning nursing. There were paint buckets to be skirted,…

In The Dark Our Story

           is still unwinding. It’s 1919, the train’s dropped us in the Panhandle. This landscape is only for the Farmer’s pleasure. We’re stick figures, black things moving in a sunlit picture; how we love is our only secret. The Farmer watches me hour on hour from his velvet chair beside the field. You say it’s…