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The Cleaving

What she learned in the trees was beyond him; emerging, she faltered a moment in the hem of shade, her garment. In that shifting mix of light and dark she appeared before him newly, presenting in the broken fruit what rose in her eyes, and beseeched him.

October

The morning harvest startles me with its generosity. Feedcorn spills over the wooden wagon, the milkweed has fattened and waits, calling touch me, touch here! Buckled up, shuffled into pairs my children challenge the very air in front of them. They grant my knees an obedient hug, they march away, so temperate, so prudent with…

Tongue

I have forgotten in what Indian tongue to lie means not to speak with forked tongue but to have death in one’s mouth. The forked tongue being a life-bearer, torch of conflict and friend of truth with its double edges. Falsehood cuts no way at all. It is to taste ashes, to betray living speech….

Intent

Not all the salmon bounding upstream, not all the bodies flush and long together that bend against the water as the grass in August bends before a wind, not all that flesh loging — cartilage and feather-bone and brain speck and gills ripping air out of water with a sound so loud it sounds like…

Mother in the Garden

In the morning the light tilts over the roof and splits into a hundred parts, each shift glowing around a vegetable. Behind me, I can hear the seedpods drop from the locusts and spread themselves over the lawn. One here, one balanced at the edge of the garden. With their darker color they are unmistakable…

Letter to My Mother

This may come as a surprise to you but as a child I belonged to another family. And even as your child I knew it. They lived on the side of a mountain in a thin house of boards The walls went many ways. I learned to walk at angles, to come and go without…

Shrimpboat

Ocean-proud at dawn she drags the Atlantic into the picture our balcony frames left to right, and for the moments she travels there I’m thankful as for anything which hasn’t changed since childhood. The nets thrown behind her churn up those rosy fish she turns up year after year though the land shifts and tide…

Ice Storm

There could be werewolves! At this latitude at least the rain can suffer in the night such a change, and lock the world inside itself, make it not the world but a likeness displayed behind glass as in a wax museum. Cut off in mid-sentence, is it not the custom to stare dumbly at the…