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     for my brother You were five. It inhabited your clothes in the closet, or flopped by the shell lamp that jittered on the ceiling. You screamed when I caught it in my trout net where it clicked and gagged and laced itself into the trammel, its mouth a lipstick heart on a gorilla’s face. You…

The peasants know bread, how it breaks beneath their hands, the long, thick nails that harden and sprout like the splayed hooves of their horses. In the fields they bend to lift stones, heavy loaves their plows have turned. Brown is the earthen smell, brown the faces and hands of workers in the weather’s oven….

     —for James G. Davis He had a good job the kid was no problem and when he compared the way his parents had to live this was nothing, a picnic and like he told his wife all he really had to do was relax, hang loose, learn to take things easy . . . but…

This headache musters in my skull slowly growing dense enough to screen your face, but your arms are sprouting like vines dropping in coils on the rug overgrowing the hidden backs of chairs while, from the dusky tangle of arms an occasional hand flashes. Your legs jam the doorways as rigid as fallen trees. I…

Outside their bed-size shacks, figures sit, mummied in zippered suits, flicking wands above the six-inch holes. In their palms they will show you tiny gold and silver jigs from Sweden, bits of neon sponge, a jar of pickled roe. At their feet, buckets of minnows to be skewered and lowered in offering. In worse weather,…

Though unable to imagine how harm could fit in there, in that tiny case, I thought I knew enough to stay afraid.                  But once, moving through the quiet house, I thought, if I can’t hear my own steps, how can God? And in the laundry room, by the dryer humming out its heat,…

Somewhere in the midwest crabapples are falling on a new Buick; crabapples are littering the sidewalk and a man is muttering darkly to himself. It’s not pleasant to contemplate these crabapples. Ordinarily he’d be having fun oiling the doors of his Buick in perfect silence. But not today. No sir. Not with these crabapples falling….

It’s no use being afraid of snakes. You can walk for days and not see one, Over saddle and switchback Of the tame, toothless Appalachians. Then suddenly he’s there, all there. In a soft, explosion of color His sharp skull flashes out From more permanent, duller Backgrounds of schist and slate. The realest thing for…

That autumn the baby died father took us on a cruise. My sister and I wore twin bonnets. We stuffed our fingers into the mouths of dolls whose eyes stared like the sea that goes black and forever. Nights we drifted; the festive strung lights were a christmas we danced inside. Mother’s apricot skirt swirled…