One of the few things we found to do in that hot city those lean years was visit the zoo, which must have been free, we were so often…

  When I hear the doctor use the term, I think I’ve nourished graffitied rows of shop windows, grates drawn closed, rows of trees felled by Dutch elm disease, side…

Remember it was once gold, desperate as a coin placed in a reservation slot machine. When your father drives through town in his Corolla he feels small again, like he…

  NOTICE THE HILLS because they may not be natural, the tour guide said, and pointing she quickly moved on to say the city was full of so much old…

  It’s easier to send gifts: a postcard from Portland, used books, colored pencils and a sketchbook, a birthday card with an ugly cartoon baby crying on its cover. I…

  It was a goldfinch. A bright male that must have been knocked from the branch, pinch of white breast quivering when I found him. He was dead before I…

  My little boat can only go so far. The coiled rope unwinds from the dock to just about midway across the lake— the point where the trees on the…

  The bird limped through my dreams, my days. I’d seen it for two weeks, stitching steps across the ball field, swift as a jacket zipper. It’d see me coming…

  Nine days since we’ve seen the sun, the clouds buried in clouds. Light falls in vellum strands like ice from wires. The river’s splintered pane belies a warmer future.…

  Here is another hive the eye might climb into, another place I’d like to put my hands, as if the heart were wings at work under the chicken wire,…

  Not starting from scratch but with a scratch of certain measures. *** Think of the voltage lurking behind the simplest of switches. *** Best to be charged by—not with—violating…

  After the disorder of my days, and in the defeat of my evenings, I love the quiet, revocable suicide of television, especially British detective shows, where everyone is driving…