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In water so clear it is taken for air, these fish maneuver like pilots: light-headed, they tilt their rudders for balance. To one side, a plaque tells how a fish may possess a “swimbladder”: filled, it suspends him weightlessly like a still ball whirling on a fountain. We forget this has only to do with…

                 Not dolls! Beware      the child who plays with them,            who handles little                  men and women      which may even, like us,                        have names to be called by and live in rooms,                  scale models of      home: then beware, the child            who plays with dolls plays      …

He had spent the morning shooting birds out of the air. Along the lower edge of the field he worked each week, the dog pressed before him through tall, autumn grasses, pressed ahead, then stopped. Birds burst up toward the light, up into the perforated air. Among the hardwoods, between their roots and the creek…

Regarding the insides of flowers: this is something about which I have meant to write you for a long time. How awkwardly, but to a bee fascinating it must seem, going in to their sticky centers, half- repellent, touching their furry genitalia; horrible to love and seek so, being dependent: flowers’ perfectly formed hemispheres, the…

I feel most alone when someone calls me by name. Even though there are times I’m completely withdrawn: when the woman beside me, as she’s speaking abstractly, seems more alive than in bed; and although her breathing reminds me we’ll be on our own sooner or later, I feel most alone when someone calls me…

The interior is ordinary although at times the light falls like sand, the furniture edges into itself and the far corners of the room relax like seascapes in the numb hours. Everything changes when a man enters the room, especially for women. A woman who is there is unable to leave although she is uncomfortable,…

My father keeps a circle of silver coins around his bed to trap angels. When they arrive to reclaim his soul the silver disintegrates the strange alloy in their wings. My mother poises at a snow-circle’s center in a game of “fox & geese” while her children disappear down a radius into some woods forever….

For Jon Anderson The unhappy . . . will fight shy of Kierkegaard, either because they are not as unhappy as they pretend, or because they really despair of comfort and cling, in defiance, to their suffering! —W. H. Auden I said I could not have built my community Without the other. I will not…

We are in her kitchen; we have one enormous pot and all the spices are together. We are too tiny and take so long to sterilize the jar; finally, more water is boiling, waiting. We don’t have to call, she hears and comes into her kitchen. We lift her over the pot. she slips into…