It is sometimes necessary to walk barefoot along a moonlit riverbank on the sodden strip where water meets land to remind oneself that something in the mud remembers the…

  She who wields you gets a grip on her task and bears down to change one thing into another, like most everything used in the kitchen except for the…

  Isn’t it my good fortune in this world On a day when there is enough bird seed in the feeder And it has warmed up enough for them to…

  Cicadas taught me to speak in low humming before my mother taught me alphabet or verb— before I learned to bathe alone in the canal behind our house, my…

  I am at home, watching a movie when you arrive unannounced, barely visible—your frame filling the unlit doorway.   I haven’t seen you in weeks—perhaps I’ve never seen you,…

  Tuesday, you said, was the easiest night to sneak into the county fair. We hid our bikes in the woods and crawled between the Ferris Wheel and a bounce…

  [a survival guide]   I’m learning to collect poisonous plants to help preserve what little food I have left. In my small hollow a few inches of edible leaves…

  If only I could speak. Other mouths can. What speech I have, I have in languid length of arm— a slow reaching, ++turn so slight given to tendril, hole-and-corner,…

  Intelligence is a hay rick shining in the sun. Pitchfork it up and find Bethlehem moldering and damp, beetles scuttling, and an underlife that tries to explain things.  …

  There are 64 panes in each window of the Harrisville church where we sit listening to a late Haydn quartet. Near the ceiling clouds build up, slowly brightening, then…

  Why was Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 my favorite piece to play when I was ten and always dreading practicing the piano? Was it the melody—his melancholy lines, like verse,…

  A brave people, who sat up straight in the grave, with only this perforated sacred bowl to protect their heads from the sad hail of dirt clods dropped by…