By August the remains will be a rope in dust, a theology, a brown snake too limp with sun to struggle. I return it to the house, unless it’s rotten, and consider the year, the hole that gapes in the seatboard. How emptied I must be, day after day. Easter on, I feed the rope…
It may all have started in nothing more than your adolescent fascination with the future: whom shall I marry — rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief? and the slavewomam’s contribution may at first have been no more than fortune-telling: an eggwhite in a glass. But for one of you, the glass held a specter in…
A few poplars stand by the frozen river. Over the lashed and flowing wilderness dull daylight stretches the sky to a wheel of slate-blue edges. Night is Norwegian Finmark blue. Fathers of cold winters, mothers and children with white teeth, all fade away toward evening. Twilight gathers pulkkas and reindeer into its wilderness. Then ropes…
Cold-blooded, the surface just above its head is collared light, ragging my reflection in a blinding lace of ice, below which it lifts like an insulated wire. I roll my sleeve, reach down and pinch its neck, hard as a bullet, then draw upward, dragging the tail from under a brick. Slowly, I coil its…
It was a respectable family I was born into. My father kept an inn; he left money and land, but after his death there was bickering among the relatives, and I got little of his estate. My first husband died young; my second was feckless and unlucky. We lost our few acres, so that…
I Where the gray beast of the water cornered itself into harbor, that mouth amid whiteness gasped on the raw deck a secret thrust from beneath the brittle hide of the sea — This surfaces again as I lurch awake speechless and wet in the gray dawn, caught in the webbed sheets:…
For six years, having no child, your father and I taped cardboard to our window, photographed butterflies on Sundays, ate or did not eat, fought over who would do dishes. I entertain you with stories. . . . Our white dog as a pup came home purple — the next day I found the pokeberry…
My mouth starts speaking in another direction Of how apples are falling into red smoke And the sun no longer publishes each leaf, or name. I want to know what’s forbidden, To enter that space An apple takes from the heart of tree. Dark radiance, your hands have unpeeled this story To the edge of…
The river is fast and black and theatrically high. Chest-deep, you strain, lean against the current. You hand me up Keith, dripping and cough-crying From the fast black river I’ve climbed from. I run him breathless to the house, bone-cold, blue, Hurry him into a hot tub. The skin, numb, stings Back to feeling. The…
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