Here is the paint-by-numbers painting of Sitting Bull’s pony she painted. Here is her imitation Navajo loom she used to weave turquoise blankets. Here is her afternoon martini shaker and the prescription Black Beauties. Mahjong tiles click rhythmically by arthritic hands of her bilingual generation. Outside the rain rains sideways, horizontal as this world is,…
When I stopped along the road and climbed the platform that the wildlife people built, I saw the dead grass moving. A darker gold that broke free from the pale gold of the field. “Wolves,” said the man who stood beside me on the platform. On his other side stood his wife and children, I…
Wine festered—a thorn at the bottom of my skull. Wind blew all the night’s big ideas off the trees. The moon had frostbite. The stars did, too. Be kind to animals was my mother’s mantra. Do your duty was my father’s. Ghosts breathed on my rearview mirror as I drove downtown. On black ice glistening…
—not in knowledge, but in calm; not in indifference, but nearly. Under bullying fog the white houses stand with effort on the coast, the tides teasing the scrub blue, the land beneath hassled by waves, drowning in salt-wine. The lichen, as scalloped and ridged as the cliffs, breathes red and gold; its smell, like the…
I’m a pea farmer. There’s a stream out back. I like the sound of it. One day out of the week, I bring home a string of brown trout and slap them down on the kitchen table. The fish god provides. If someone knocks on my door rather than stroll in, I don’t like it….
A swirl of leaves tosses its bag of colors over the shoulder of an unmarked road. In the century- old barn where the leaves take refuge, the wind is a permanent resident rehearsing the music of abandonment. And in this hollow the leaves— who found each other before they got lost and braided—are endlessly tweaking…
The minute I feel the urgent glow Quick in the black you’re smiling Up at what I have no right to call A harvest moon (that’s not code). Let me ask you for something, A good shoulder-pounding and the tub’s Aromatic salts, a cigar is just No justice, no peace. October Crushes your soft lip….
The rednecks are loathsome I know maybe because they’ve hardly been anywhere or because they don’t wonder if there’s a God or because they’re too busy wearing boots the ends of which could be knives and cotton T-shirts the sleeves of which maybe they think were invented to wrap cigarettes in and hair that’s so…
Named after the Romantic poet who swam the Grand Canal, The bewildered surfer lives with his girl, his boy in a duplex by the shore. But the house isn’t a teepee in a field like where he grew To a state with his mother and father and sibs in northern forests Bewildered, though now he…
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