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…
Upon reaching shore the nearly drowned man asserted his independence from the sea by wringing it out of his hat and hands. And then the trees standing knee to knee just beyond the strip of beach, making it narrower. And then the pieces of wreckage came in like chunks of daily mail. How distant England….
"I've decided," he says, as Deena's step brings her to the kitchen, "to take the toaster with me. Because it was my toaster, remember, and besides, you can use the oven to toast bread or muffins, or whatever you want to. It's easy, I can show you. You set it at three-hundred -" But her…
God keeps his oath to sparrows who of little love know how to starve. — Emily Dickinson 1 I’m coming, clear out. They shit on the bulb in the lamp on the ceiling until the light emerges weakly like an old man’s flashlight through spit in the frozen, icy ground in deepest winter where ten…
One eye streaming in a cold wind of cows thin windows, animal- thighed men with daughters that crouch the fields like rabbits. Snow mounts the measuring side of the white church shuttered at the crossroad. Flat, there are no wrinkles to read, to bring the horizon near. Nothing under the noncommittal sky but a staunch…
My mother was in the midst of making the beds. The windows were thrown open and the sheets and blankets and pillows were piled up on top of the radiator cover in front of the open windows. A vigorous bedmaker, my mother stripped the beds of their sheets and blankets with an assaultiveness that was…
Don’t let them tell you — the women or the men — they knew me. You knew me. Don’t let them tell you I didn’t love your mother. I loved her. Or let them tell you. Do you remember Rye? — where the small fishing boats, deprived of the receding sea, took the tide out,…
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