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When I see the mules lurching down the hillside, tobacco sheaves quivering like ragmops, I can’t see myself anywhere else. My village below is a failing hive, the young swarming into adulthood to feed the honeycomb America. Wives hover alone by their doors, watching the dust, daughters move in pairs buying bread and salt. They…

The bathroom tiles are very pink and new. Out the window, a sixty-foot willow tree forks, droops. Planted eighteen years ago, its huge roots choke the drains. The very blue sky is impenetrable. I hear you whine outside the locked door. You’re going to cry. If I open the door, I’ll slap you. I’ve hit…

     (Simla, India) It is March— the big change. Nothing is certain in the weather. Clouds are moving all over the mountains, the sun, the rain slanting into the hills. We walk for an hour, then look over the bowl of the valley— deep as a sea, birds floating and diving like fishes gliding among a…

I To begin with photographs of summer: lakes ringed by white birch held by hands of white bone— skeletons as delicate as the skeletons of birds. To begin with a scene in a theater: a man and woman sit on a red couch and between them are photographs so bright that each becomes a small…

But last year it happened also. For twenty-five years my best friend lives in a house across the street; our children in college now, they play in play-pens together, and for twenty-five years we drink coffee together each      morning. Last year, because of my accent, I ask her to come with me to the school…

We might have had a child; we wished for it — already the flowers were falling from the apple tree. In the sun that woke the whole pale wood we lay, half-naked, everything around us rife with more of itself. The body, baffled animal, trapped close to its own door, scents the lair, sees the…

What I need to know is whether or not I don’t disbelieve. Quiet, as if we were listening for it, we follow the tip of our thought and hope we’re gathered to one point like lightning. I don’t say it to the others, but speaking as the base of this triangle, the last thing I…

The dead spoil every picnic. The way they lie back on the grass like exhausted lovers staring up at the cloud packed sky pretending to see things there that we don’t see. The dead refuse the cold fried chicken, the potato salad that was their favorite. They keep their mouths clamped around a giant guffaw….

When he left her, she took what was given. After a while, she came to love the second one — the man, house-builder — suited more for her body. But at night, when she lay beneath him, it was leaves she listened for, not the stilled wood of roof. She never spoke of her first…