In a dirt village near Sierra Plata, men who are their own shadows, their own wives, drive flatbeds to the taverns; sweat-stained, with gold dust stuffed in little sacks that dangle along the hard edges, the steel curves of their bodies. Tense as switchblades, they wait for the finger-touch of a woman, a thief, or…
Who in his right mind would hold the brothers to blame? They lived in their own mental torment, unrelieved by day or their own lies. The sun dropped like a stone one night and the brothers talked on. The past, the son, the younger people in their life. The garden. The heart can approach the…
On my knees in the dark I looked out the front door of my parents' house and across the street saw an identical stoop, the porthole glass wreathed in pine boughs with a flat red bow. I knew if I crossed the street and entered, taking living room, stairwell and landing in reverse, I'd end…
All night I search the dead for inspiration. Outside, the lawns have turned to wilderness. Plows turning the snow. Gusts of wind dissolve in a tangle of elms. Ice forms on the new roof. Weakens it. Too much trying has finally ended. No one seems ever to come or to go. Only the taillights of…
The store could be in Nova Scotia, it doesn't open unless someone's there. Across the far field the moon is waning, a bright bird still sings in the dark, a car is in the ditch. The car has lain there for almost 20 years. Across the field from my cousin Harold's there was a house…
Locked in bathrooms for hours, daydreaming in kitchens as they leaned their elbows into the shells of lemons, they were humming, they were humming Hully Gully. Summer lasted a long time; porch geraniums rocked the grandmothers to sleep as night slugged in, moon riding the sky like a drop of oil on water. Then down…
Because, of breasts with their nipples, of eggs so warm beneath their hen they seem to pulse, to throb, to give birth to themselves the way when your mouth has been on my nipple so long I begin to dissolve, begin to travel through your body, all larger longer than my own and lodge there,…
1 This morning, everything went with the tide: Deirdre's doll, Heather's hat, the Meow-Mix cats, all but this surge inside, nerve-sheaths white, blue-green, my ramrod spine loose, flexible at last. How to possess ourselves at 5 a.m.? When they come to me feverish and pocked, I tell them to brush their teeth, gnaw on a…
In abalone, northern lights settle down like barnacles incrusting holds of chinaware beneath the seas. Light plays, rolling designs on waves— hypnotic damascene— and gaze turns into sea-stare trained on the slates of eternity. Beyond, below, the headlands, magnitudes of brightness fade; light settles down, losing speed in long…
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