Slate blue clouds, bare trees Standing sentinel: in the air A mild chill. What better day, Dear God, to be alive, to be still.

look what you have built: the artificial lagoon (landlocked by dunes, too shallow, but you are the only one bothered by that) imported white-sand beach (upon which sunbathers gather their…

What I despise are the wrong questions, the requests of the strivers: How much did they pay you? Oh the indignity. How did you meet so-and-so? The stupidity. Please, ask…

Of course there are nights when I crave a woman— Of course the hardness of the road gets to me, Of course I feel the Roman stones beneath my sandals,…

The truth is, you never wanted to be normal; so the wily shoemaker says to me, when I find him transformed, a leather merchant in Verona, cavorting with the sellers…

I couldn’t take it anymore. Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Howard, Thomas More. It was like all those frickin’ Josés in 100 Years of Solitude. So I put the Toms…

I am holding two frog hearts in my palms; they are greenish, warm, labial. I am following the tell of the dream that eluded me upon waking yesterday morning, which…

The threading finally shot on the window crank, I disassemble the unit and out falls a tiny egg, like a porcelain ball bearing. It may have been there for years.…

In a small Bolivian town on a narrow cobblestone path, a woman in a black bowler hat and white embroidered blouse sits at a tiny tin table in front of…

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become…

Our grey home was visited last night by a storm. I woke to a green sky standing at my window. I told the storm it could not enter. My husband…

1 —What about here? I ask; brief shore; old blanket we slept under in Genesis; its skin of ripples, the river; out of the basket, sourdough, cheddar, plums. How can…