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Consider the annals of a small town in western North Carolina. Assemble the interesting sequences of fact and supposition from several points of view. Sift. Beyond a certain point, you say, these facts are not interesting; or, you say you’ll never be able to uncover details vivid enough to be interesting. You are wrong on…

Warned, warned for years what too much love would do, I settled for never enough. I did not have a body, sleeping in the attic, spare and still, suns falling past the tiny window, blooded, always the maples whispering below, rattling with leaves, rattling with emptiness. Too much sleeping woke me. My arms opened first,…

For the last time I lie harbored in the bed, tied like a boat to my husband. I think everyone has died. The season mumbles in the hills, I stay to hear if it is summer envying even this cold wind that finds its way into the house. Oh sad to clean the floor and…

Is there any reason why a poem shouldn’t at least occasionally come through for us in a concrete way and get something done? Because I need to get something across to a particular individual with whom I have no normal contact, I mean I never see this guy, and yet I’ve got something to say…

This close to the green sea, wild geranium and Nootka lupine all around, one does not need cathedrals to see God. God humbles himself; He walks among the white crosses on the bluff, among the graves nodding with chocolate lilies, buys Pepsi and sunglasses at the general store, cuts bait for halibut, stands in stench…

Each drop of rain is a fraction of a second. It rains all night. If the rain on one leaf could be heard it would be the sound of one life passing. The women nursing her mother thinks at night she sees what she is made of. She is so tired that even with her…

Sense the roosted owl in its bush, the field windy with crickets, the loose cantata of your bull-frogged pond. Beneath her fresh spine, the earth turns with skill Prepare to gather coat and hat, her toy, her growing body from the flesh-crushed hay, to hear the anger of her wakening in your well-meant arms.

While I dress someone sits at a table, someone in the country pulls water from a well. I rake furiously through my hair. As for the others, one moves a chair closer, one writes a love poem. *     *      * Though I have read of them, Rasputin and Houdini are dead. They like to sleep because…

The brownstone facade’s lit up and guarded; inside, a frayed partition. A child stuffs his pockets full of stolen turnips, and women gather together the folds of their white dresses. A man leans against the doorjamb, watching the black plumes file past. With one knee bent in a posture of strength he picks the youngest….