What can I learn from the hummingbird, a big thing like me? I hardly have time to study its flash, its momentous iridescence, before it disappears into the mimosa, sated with nectar. I admire the way the greenery trembles. I remember reading that this bird is never sated—its whole miniature life an exercise in digestion….
It must have been you whipping the sheets like sails in my face, when I ran between the rows of wet wash. You brushed my neck when I was yanked by a skirt hem from under a speeding truck the year I was five. You are the one I left a warm bed for when…
The stone walls had lost the stone life of Under-earth, and, against the air, set their mouths in a jagged seam. The sky gave no rich press of the pores of life, no movement like the womb's stirrings of a vein, a root, a worm. In this world of the exposed skull, rain was simply…
When I was seven and first learned about sex in the tool shed out behind Aunt Pauline's house, Bobby Joe and I stood facing each other trying to fuck because his older brother and my older sister had told us to. In a shade tree outside cicadas droned. A car drove up the road. And…
The receiver is back in its cradle. Against the windows of this house my brother has never visited, and never will visit, a light rain begins to fall. Why do we persist in honoring the tragic? the outsized? the doomed?—when it's what is small and diminishing that defeats us: that is us. You know, I…
Sunday afternoon on 91st St. Two sisters Wore sailor hats and navy reefers: HMS Elizabeth held both her parents' hands. I, HMS Blenheim, trotted alone, snorting at the traffic. The family headed for a visit to The Planetarium where the moon raced, crazy, And the world came off its axis, And I made a run…
White cottonwood tufts fill the air like moths; we rub our eyes in the filmy atmosphere thick with white dreams, while down the road at the Sagebrush Inn, a Seeing Eye dog sleeps beneath the piano where his mistress practices Linda Ronstadt's greatest hits. Afternoon. The room is empty except for the bartender swatting at…
for Danielle Inseminator, hole-scrubber, midwife, you ache from the scuffle and weight of hauling the troubled cow into stanchions, of thrusting your leek-long arms inside to free the breech that fell against your chest, a steaming new world veined in fading latitudes. Inside the dimly lit birth sac lies the earth-colored calf already weaned from…
Three deer stare into the dark rooms as if I had something they could take back with them. Opaque at the window, I breathe with the house. Now they dent the thick-ribbed ice with their fine hooves for apples preserved like rubies under glass. They are simple as monks gathered in the orchard after vespers,…
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