The angel kissed my alphabet, it tingled like a cobweb in starlight. A few letters detached themselves and drifted in shadows, a loneliness they carry like infinitesimal coffins on their heads. She kisses my alphabet and a door opens: blackbirds roosting on far ridges. A windowpeeper under an umbrella watches a funeral service. Blinkered horses…
Mountain blue on the powerline, preening as the big C-119 heads out low over aspen and yellow pine, dragging slurry to Challis, up by Yankee Fork. Idaho is burning. Hot dogs on sale at The Merc; pleasure craft tearing apart the morning lake send osprey wheeling toward deeper woods. Aspen, osprey— haze over half the…
—North wind flows from the mountain like water, a clear constancy Runnelling through the grapevines, Slipping and eddying over the furrows the grasses make Between the heaves and slackening of the vine rows, Easing and lengthening over the trees, then smooth, flat And without sound onto…
Since I don't know who will be reading this or even if it will be read, I must invent someone on the other end of eternity, a distant cousin laboring under the same faint stars I labored under all those unnumbered years ago. I make you like me in everything I can — a man…
Scarecrow, they called me, in my old gingham, poked up on a pole to tilt and waltz with whatever fickle wind happened by. My blood, bone and heart: old stable straw ticking with crickets, locusts, every harvest-hungry insect. For years I watched this garden someone else planted. Limbs all akimbo, pure as a saint, I…
A farmer digging a well in central China uncovered the site where 6000 terra-cotta soldiers were buried by the first Chin emperor. . . . [guided tour] How we would love to take the things of this world with us to the next: a wife, a well-thumbed book, something in gold, perhaps, to mimic sunlight….
In the almost empty cafe I light a cigarette, taking pleasure in blue hieroglyphics the smoke makes. This is the first free time I've had to myself in months. In Egypt the beautiful, leathery flesh of a mummy aches for the sun's nonpartisan appraisal. New arrival, at the next table, an old man—in a voice…
. . . the bird on a branch painted by some Sung academician is a symbol to express what we might call the bird-on-bough aspect of eternity. The Arts of China, Sullivan On a branch somewhere in eternity a bird sits, each feather one silhouette of the brush laid flat on the page, each leaf…
I'm your private dancer, a dancer for money. . . — from a Tina Turner song When Celina arrived the floor was on fire. You could tell by her hips and her mouth she was built for the tango. Glasses of clear amber danced the tables on the tango rhythm. You could tell this place…
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