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Blue Spill

He’s been wading deeper into the accident area where he’s the fatherless son and the sonless father. He walks on through the valley and over the mountains, some still virgin, with the same concentration, heart, he has benefited from this spill. He is now betrothed to blue, at home with her wisdom of refracted light,…

Springtide

As time and time when I am broken I think of you, when young, there fills the unintelligible ocean with flood tide and a thousand sails. The shore of trouble is then hidden, the wrack of each sorrow and each reef, and round my feet there is the silken rubbing of an unbroken grief. Why…

Five Years Old

Stars fell all night. The iceman had been very generous that day with his chips and slivers. And I had buried my pouch of jewels inside a stone casket under the porch, their beauty saved for another world. And then my sister came home and I threw a dart through her cheek and cried all…

The Bat

I was reading about rationalism, the kind of thing we do up north in early winter, where the sun leaves work for the day at 4:15. Maybe the world is intelligible to the rational mind; and maybe we light the lamps at dusk for nothing. . . . Then I heard wings overhead. The cats…

The Wild Cheese

A head of cheese raised by wolves or mushrooms recently rolled into the village, it could neither talk nor walk upright. Small snarling boys ran circles around it; and just as they began throwing stones, the Mayor appeared and dispersed them. He took the poor ignorant head of cheese home, and his wife scrubbed it…

The Boat People

Sometimes I see the schoolmaster on the boat that is shiny with brine and comes from Asia. He is the Ancient Mariner and his finger jabs at a pamphlet soaked with salt, the words running away from back to front, the albatross outstretched, its eyes glazing. The rickshaws arrive at the wedding, with the dead…

Dark All Afternoon

for Laura Jensen The boats are rented, complete with open sail, as if there were a map, somewhere to go, somewhere besides the cold and nautical Charles, one river wide, up and down, and slow. Even the moon right now, in love, in cloud, is piecemeal, something of a city ghost— something about the sun…