When the black snake flashed onto the morning road, and the truck could not swerve— death, that is how it happens. Now he lies looped and useless as an old bicycle tire. I stop the car and carry him into the bushes. He is as cool and gleaming as a braided whip, he is as…
A man with shovels in his hands is waiting. I think he is holding them out for us to take, to move coal into the bin near the old furnace. He stands taller than my father and it was never him who shovelled the huge lumps of brilliant anthracite, but her and me; working silently,…
1 It can be fun, it can be grotesque. Also, it can be great. Most people agree on this; a few toughened anti-romantics will never say it out loud; it’s the truth; but it’s also true that often it isn’t even good — the demon of poor timing hops into bed and screws you both….
The morning harvest startles me with its generosity. Feedcorn spills over the wooden wagon, the milkweed has fattened and waits, calling touch me, touch here! Buckled up, shuffled into pairs my children challenge the very air in front of them. They grant my knees an obedient hug, they march away, so temperate, so prudent with…
I have forgotten in what Indian tongue to lie means not to speak with forked tongue but to have death in one’s mouth. The forked tongue being a life-bearer, torch of conflict and friend of truth with its double edges. Falsehood cuts no way at all. It is to taste ashes, to betray living speech….
Not all the salmon bounding upstream, not all the bodies flush and long together that bend against the water as the grass in August bends before a wind, not all that flesh loging — cartilage and feather-bone and brain speck and gills ripping air out of water with a sound so loud it sounds like…
In the morning the light tilts over the roof and splits into a hundred parts, each shift glowing around a vegetable. Behind me, I can hear the seedpods drop from the locusts and spread themselves over the lawn. One here, one balanced at the edge of the garden. With their darker color they are unmistakable…
This may come as a surprise to you but as a child I belonged to another family. And even as your child I knew it. They lived on the side of a mountain in a thin house of boards The walls went many ways. I learned to walk at angles, to come and go without…
Ocean-proud at dawn she drags the Atlantic into the picture our balcony frames left to right, and for the moments she travels there I’m thankful as for anything which hasn’t changed since childhood. The nets thrown behind her churn up those rosy fish she turns up year after year though the land shifts and tide…
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