I’d forgotten you so liked art. And many things advanced in those days to a point of consciousness beyond any speech or understanding the nerves could utter. Yet when I designed the fine-blown glassware you impressed upon each piece a delicate leaf, a hand, a monstrous kiss that marked each one’s relief from the next,…
The small ones, in suits and dresses, wrapped their rosaries round the chairlegs or tapped the wall with squeaky shoes. But their widowed mother, at thirty-four, had mastered every pose of mourning, plodding the sadness like an ox through mud. Her mind ran well ahead of her heart, making calculations of the years without him…
It is morning. After Lena has stripped Marigold's udder and strained the goat's milk into the refrigerator jug; after she has fed the horses and the dogs; and after she has shooed Evvie's gander off the lawn to the edge of the fire pond and scattered a handful of grain there to keep him interested,…
after Elder Olson Six inches tall, the Russian doll stands like a wooden bowling pin. On her painted head her red babushka melts into her shawl and scarlet peasant dress, and spreading over that, the creamy lacquer of her apron. A hairline crack fractures the equator of her copious belly, that when twisted and pulled…
There are no edges to the sky. A star falls, exploding in a fountain of light near the tops of the mountains. The black Saguaros loom around us lifting their rigid, pitiful arms, and the moonlight throws their black shadows across our bodies. Standing on the desert makes me think of a glass pitcher of…
A spider floats from the apple tree With a silk thread Through air to the blossoming dogwood. The long silk, Spittle and linchpin, is cut By the wing of an evening grosbeak. Over the late lawn, Between flowering trees like blue parallel snowfields, Is a cedar birdhouse Within which a man wakes. The cut thread,…
Charlie Kelly was her eighth lover since the divorce. He was standing naked in silhouette, as slim as a stiletto in the light from the hall, rifling through the pockets in his jacket for his cigarettes. The sight of him gave Kate no pleasure. She hated the smell of cigarette smoke in her bedroom. She…
Each day, each morning, before the sun can touch one edge of anything, within the oak’s shadow an unfamiliar bird begins to sing. Against the sky, the leaves the dark has polished are now shingled like the grisaille wings of the bird, and the whole garden’s gone over with the same meticulous hand, the grasses…
Land’s cape bold as Joseph’s, colors luminous as the dreamy hem of horizon, till night falls, or rises from the inner shade of evergreens, or expands from air you just traded with local trees quick as light turns and dies. After afternoon’s omniscience from the lofty…
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