A steer hung from its hocks, stream of plasma under my boots, water-thinned. The butcher works rhythmically. Hands pale and firm. The steer is a hulking, swiveling shadow. The…

  These are the things that do tend towards miniaturization— shore towns, ocean liners, fitful poetry, extreme weather, city of Cambridge, the mild. All of a summer day from Magazine…

  The road from Louisburgh through an intersection toward Killeen, got pokier and stonier with wreckage and walls and boatloads of early, Mweelrea Mountains looming in fog, the ocean thrown…

    MEANWHILE, THE EYE RUNS AHEAD, THE MIND WANDERS   This embroidery was made by a young American woman named Hannah Otis.   Embroidered clouds,   It depicts our…

  I know what happens in the end. I’ve seen the movie many times. The young son makes it. The father, he dies   strutting cheerfully for his son in…

  Once I was air- borne, brief gust, thrown from the hot white metal of a car—   do I have to go? I asked the paramedic. He buckled me…

  The dogs began to bark. The dogs were almost always barking. Whenever someone would approach the house or just walk by, the dogs would bark. But C and S…

CLICK HERE TO READ

  Not in the goodbye so much itself as in the greeting Of goodbye, the real letting go, as you say (hello) Rests not in the heat of the moment:…

  I was surprised the mattress shop sold deathbeds, I hadn’t thought of it as a niche, but when I lay down upon it— Swan’s down, classical ticking, wire coiled…

You drank in the King of Prussia most nights, aging just as you’d intended—surreptitiously, with wrinkles in your lungs. And you still wore that red ribbon round your neck— kittenish,…