The owls are impossible, priceless, a hundred points at least. They live at night and call from the dark like children. Their heart-shaped faces, their moth-like silences—. But the carrion crows are obvious. They enter the pines with parts of their wings still caught in sunlight. Four, then five of them bitching, ragging the emptiness….
Here’s a romantic prison for you. This could be Scotland: a crag and far below the froth-marled river. Where is the stag, the laird, where are the baying hounds? Welcome instead to Hotel California. Johnny Cash sang right there, in Graystone Chapel, and from the blue, disconsolate congregation he drew, like blood, whoops and yelps…
When I saw the x-ray of my boy’s broken bones the young doctor held up to the light a fist closed around my heart. Behind us in the gurney he was lost in his pain, betrayed by the world like birds by false spring. The little Mozart piece would be abandoned to summer evenings jangled…
Great God of any particular mood. Sometimes it is all too bovinely obvious. Driving home from the Indian college I followed a car jammed full of buffalo heads snaking along the road to White Clay. Belching smoke on a blistering day the rusted heap of a car cruised, exuding the miasma of red men with…
Heat sensors, cameras on automatic pan, vast slabs of prefabricated wall trucked in and joined on site like grandiose dominos. . . . It took the state eight years to plan to keep those men apart from you and me and only sometimes from each other, for even gang rapists and murderers are social animals….
1. Everything we ate was on foot. We didn’t have the Norge or the Frigidaire, only salt to keep. Autumn’s hog went in brine for days, swimming. You had to boil forever just to get the taste out. I loved winter & its chitlins, but boy I hated cleaning. If not from the hogs, we…
The dream rises and falls like the breath of a sleeper in long smooth mirroring waves. My mother arises, presses against the surface of the water, which to her appears a flat gold-leafed roof or sky. But for my part I can see her figure made responsible by the water, no longer mirror-black and reckless,…
Summers meant peeling: peaches, pears, July, all carved up. August was a tomato dropped in boiling water, my skin coming right off. And peas, Lord, after shelling all summer, if I never saw those green fingers again it would be too soon. We’d also make wine, gather up those peach scraps, put them in jars…
Two heaps of clothes by an old stump, and Nicholas neck-deep in that water too cold for our own good. Shimmering when he said he wasn’t sure but thought maybe it was a man he wanted, though I was what he had under his hands in that blue current. Blue of the nearly and almost….
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