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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…

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…

All messages presented a plain solution. One morning in the east valley, the sun was eclipsed and as the sentry steadied the cooking pot, there was a brief and splendid shower of red moths. This wasn’t a diversion, but a signal to arise. We were well advised and got going. For the navigators, the fish…

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…

After Thanksgiving what is there but old newspaper and wet leaves pressed on the drive. We step out on to the road glistening like blue coal and can walk for miles. The doctor next door stands in his yard, hands to hips, surveying spanish moss the limbs wrenched out of the sky. A dog wags…

Beyond the window there’s only the lawn and a fence forming a square around the house. I strip the meat off the fish and throw the bones into the soup. Rising from the pot, the oils collect in a tight skin across the lid. This is the way my patience leaves and then comes back…