Whoever stopped rowing took this picture of me standing, fists in jacket pockets, beside the rotting pier, another potential failure, feature of the empty April beach, new companion to…

  1. The Melancholy of Departure The removal began precisely as its planners had decided months earlier with names and ages and dispositions: dead, the dispositions always showed those to…

  The train seems heavier on the tracks tonight although the news is now old news—   the unexpected derision at the local hangout, the two girls who were drinking…

  When I return to the dog, the first thing I see is the teeth. And then the dog disappears. But the teeth remain. Bared. Bereft of dog. The bared…

  We sit beneath a giant maple watching pirouettes of yellow gust upwards, each leaf an illumined skin stretched across a pliable spine. My son spins an apple between his…

  Completely blind since  birth, Laura would stare for minutes into a close-held flashlight beam, press the heels of her thumbs into her eyes so she could ‘see’ the eruption…

  At the bus stop under the horse chestnut, we tally the length of Boyhood against the babysitter's plans for later and, waiting, see the leaves have started to wilt,…

  The first block stretched on with big doors and sometimes a doorman standing in front who smiled or touched his hand to his hat and I hurried past to…

  where Route 100 meets School Street, two cows graze. I've heard Vermonters lend their cows to neighbors—and to the city, it seems—free food for cows, free mowing for the…