I lead him back through the dark wing, past ice-ferned windows to the hearth. For a while he wants to know more about the harpoons and the portraits on the walls. We have come from the grim beach, where edging out on the ice as far as we dared, we could see these windows shining…
I Migrations I've often seen the kildeer on her grounded nest. In pastures she fluttered, fearful under the rush and noise of my father's machines. I know her circus performance, limping away in a primitive gait, a ruse to save her young. My parents' migration last year from farm to acreage, from stove to silver…
Driving south on U.S. 71 forty miles from Fort Smith I heard a woman speak from the back seat. “You want a good idea for a closing line?” I recognized the voice. “Where did you come from?” “I wiggled in back there when you stopped for gas. You'd better pull over.” She knew about the…
Horses wandered on the beach where waves broke over three bodies with a spray of white lace. The left hand of the first dead kept waving like seaweed in the tide. Two moons crossed the empty eyes of the second dead. And the third, whose lover would not know till dawn, did not hear the…
No salt glaze on a dish is so delicately cracked as are this morning's leaves, shelled in ice. The cherry stones still linked to the tree, the cables of the rose arbor, the hips and myrtle husks and curled threads of the Adam's Needle have clung to the clear thought of ice. Scatterings of ice…
Where has this face grown up before? The tintype glassing in the drawer- What, in this afro-ed cousin's-child? This meristem of sallow cheeks, this Thompson twig of fretted lids, this little hollow to the ribcage? If June and Cedar Grove were gone, still this blithe tune all triplets would play on. Cousin and offspring sit…
I want to remember the cold mornings I spent that winter in the front seat of my uncle's ancient pickup. It was simple work, the two of us waiting for the first signs of light, listening to the steady lisp of snow over the crowns of loblolly pines. We both knew that near us speckled…
And for sure his soul is as good as gone as the frayed ribbon quoting John and now marking a forgotten page in the Analects and at the bottom of the stairs the accumulation of coats in the front closet and now perhaps the need to talk to whoever has rung the bell and rung…
In the last photograph taken of my father, his mouth was open to speak, and his eyes, like glass to me, are weak and without focus. Or else the grainy film, malignant cells working, hid him behind a gray gauze screen. It is fall, and the sun, lowered on a string, is small and halting…
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