In the darkening barn, one bulb stares, fly-specked. I squat the stool, lean my brow in against her loin. She moans, already dripping in the pail. I inhale the ammonia of hay and urine. It doesn’t clear my head. Instead, a foggy, white river winds through a cheese-green valley, grass still poking through the snow….
Your chest and arms around me hang to my clothes. I had forgotten how your curly hair twisted my stomach, how your broad shoulders spiked my body with nerves. You said it was so easy; that you loved the man from the moment your hands touched. And all our problems suddenly made sense. How useless…
Well, then, since the changing light announces early evening, we two, who knew you, walk arm in arm, up from this sea village. What is that rising from the sea wreathed in a spray of songs? Is it the great original fish wallowing landward, or only the common sphere, itself, rolled in its blue waters?…
By August the remains will be a rope in dust, a theology, a brown snake too limp with sun to struggle. I return it to the house, unless it’s rotten, and consider the year, the hole that gapes in the seatboard. How emptied I must be, day after day. Easter on, I feed the rope…
It may all have started in nothing more than your adolescent fascination with the future: whom shall I marry — rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief? and the slavewomam’s contribution may at first have been no more than fortune-telling: an eggwhite in a glass. But for one of you, the glass held a specter in…
A few poplars stand by the frozen river. Over the lashed and flowing wilderness dull daylight stretches the sky to a wheel of slate-blue edges. Night is Norwegian Finmark blue. Fathers of cold winters, mothers and children with white teeth, all fade away toward evening. Twilight gathers pulkkas and reindeer into its wilderness. Then ropes…
Cold-blooded, the surface just above its head is collared light, ragging my reflection in a blinding lace of ice, below which it lifts like an insulated wire. I roll my sleeve, reach down and pinch its neck, hard as a bullet, then draw upward, dragging the tail from under a brick. Slowly, I coil its…
It was a respectable family I was born into. My father kept an inn; he left money and land, but after his death there was bickering among the relatives, and I got little of his estate. My first husband died young; my second was feckless and unlucky. We lost our few acres, so that…
I Where the gray beast of the water cornered itself into harbor, that mouth amid whiteness gasped on the raw deck a secret thrust from beneath the brittle hide of the sea — This surfaces again as I lurch awake speechless and wet in the gray dawn, caught in the webbed sheets:…
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