She wakens early remembering her father rising in the dark lighting the stove with a match scraped on the floor. Then measuri… water for coffee, and later the sm…

We live here because the houses are clean, the lawns run right to the street and the streets run away. No one walks here.

The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning… a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the streambed. I go higher

Three boys down by the river search for crawdads. One has hammered a spear from a curtain rod, and head down, jeans rolled up to his knees, wade…

“I’ve been where it hurts.” the K… He becomes Sierra Kid I passed Slimgullion, Morgan Min… Camp Seco, and the rotting Lode. Dark walls of sugar pine —,

A man roams the streets with a bas… of freestone peaches hollering, “P… peaches, yellow freestone peaches… My grandfather in his prime could… the Tigers of Wrath or the factor…

First light. This misted field is the world, that man slipping the greased bolt back and forth, that man tunneled with blood

People sit numbly at the counter waiting for breakfast or service. Today it’s Hartford, Connecticut more than twenty-five years after the last death of Wallace Stevens…

He made a line on the blackboard, one bold stroke from right to left diagonally downward and stood back to ask, looking as always at no on… in particular, “What have I done?…

Seven years ago I went into the High Sierras stunned by the d… to die. For hours I stared into a… mountain stream that fell down over speckled rocks, and then I

Something has fallen wordlessly and holds still on the black drive… You find it, like a jewel, among the empty bottles and cans where the dogs toppled the garbage…

Half an hour to dress, wide rubber… gauntlets to the elbow, a plastic… like a knight’s but with a little… that kept steaming over, and a res… to save my smoke-stained lungs. I…

Remember how unimportant they seemed, growing loosely in the open fields we crossed on the way to school. We would carve wooden swords

In the early morning before the sh… opens, men standing out in the yar… on pine planks over the umber mud. The oil drum, squat, brooding, bri… with metal scraps, three-armed cro…

When the Lieutenant of the Guardi… heard the automatic go off, he tur… and took the second shot just abov… the sternum, the third tore away the right shoulder of his uniform,