No deer entered the orchard this evening, though mist gathered, pressed into the hill, and the moon pulled slowly over and away. It is ludicrous to think of the apple trees longing, of the apples themselves scented to draw down deer. It is ludicrous; but what is one to think mornings, finding beneath the trees,…
Suddenly, the magical horse looks ordinary, the black bale of his chest diminished—and the puffy cat stops, mid-prowl, where each bare twig of the poplar stands forth from the main stem like frightened hair: the voice is breaking its year-long spell. And in the garden pool, upside-down, a young man’s lips are glittering; he holds…
1 First morning since she was born I have not nursed her, and I am dissolving among the blasted hearts on the psychiatric ward a man shudders with cold under many blankets a blind catatonic is wheeled back from the shower and now a woman approaches with snapshots and knitting she is concerned why am…
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.
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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