The air still freighted with her labor holds them both, cow, and calf creased in her flank, together, the simple alphabet of bond and bondage. Drawing close, I stared at her long profile, her huge eye brimming like a dark tear. In the shadows, heavy with scent of dung I saw Hera, Queen of Olympus,…
—Jonathan Edwards Edwards said we may go out of the world suddenly at any moment, when God pours his words before us & they freeze On roads, on bridges, new cold skin is laid on, flayed off by the wind’s whipping sentence. Driving, I hold my foot back: in due time it will…
A cold joy leaps from the orchard in early evening, when the pear and apple flower. Their petals enclose the nubs of the unformed fruits with a private dampness. Cattle drift through the fields like headstones, and soon the sky will spill its milky light down almost into the trees. Children are swimming in a…
I did not know, any longer, the meaning of my happiness; it held me unexplained. Eudora Welty Out I would go, as if out were a city, and I was buoyant and self-absorbed, my own climate, though like a pond my city held its own warm and chill districts aloof to the good news and…
Clyde, you were older than the other fourth graders; your chalky face set off with slick, black hair, your lips too red. When you smiled your mouth went thick as a slug, and when I turned my head in class you were always there like a dream I couldn’t wake from, bent over your work,…
Like the hand of her husband pressing, it goes beneath the earth, turns to straw the deep white roots. Over the creekbed come those who watch from yellowing trees, watch as she and the girl break down a length of berm and lay-in the man. Watched: the girl, who is last to shrink within her…
Contending in memoried turns under its date the tape winds a while longer to mull death over. The hearts of his children have cooled since then, ten years like ten young trees grown to shade. Once teen-aged boys on the hilled grass, young athletes out of shape to lift the coffin of one who dealt…
No wonder it feels like a chore, by the hour, the ounce, the follicle, and no wonder we’d be more bored without our boring jobs than we are on the grayest Monday. It’s work, being depressed, and we’re tired, and we fall asleep and dream and wake like a skim of fat on a broth,…
Hot, sticky night, the moving truck is at the door. Only a few weeks since your death. Your things arrive, the contents of your life spill over mine, disrupting my careful rooms. The moving men stumble up the stairs. I hear myself call, “Put the desk in the bedroom, gentlemen, please.” Already your elaborate courtesies…
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