Words without meaning An open mouth seems empty Trying to express Something that dances lightly Forefront of a clouded heart
Is there something dark? Dark, dark, deep down inside me Something that keeps me Away from the center ring A divergent path indeed
People see the pretty house Not the abuse that happens inside They see smiles and laughter Not the endless tears at night People see a child playing house w…
It was fifty cents a game beneath exhausted ceiling fans, the smoke’s old spiral. Hooded lig… burned distant, dull. I was tired,… insisted on one more, so I chalked
One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nai… above the door, still losing its l… and a work-collar swings, an empty old noose. The silence waits, wild… broken by hoofbeat and heavy
For three years you lived in your… just as it was before she died: yo… portrait on the mantel, her clothe… in the closet, her hair still in t… You have told me you gave it all a…
Every time I go back home, my mot… tells me I should begin to think n… I refuse, as though somehow this i… already done a harder thing than I… have to do. She was only eighteen…
Two boys, not quite men, pretended… algae, green, black, red– the gard… fast, it disappeared into deeper water, returning to another presen… where the boulders cut the current…
This is the season of her dying, a… have kept it, I find, underneath t… in a box filled with photographs—h… of that last year, the calendar a… she did not intend to write. In th…
The world has certified itself rid… all but the argument: to eradicate… the small stock of variola frozen, quarantined—a dormancy it has refused, just once, for a woman be…
The word itself: prim, retired, it… her portrait above the fireplace,… the boredom she abhorred, then per… her hands held upward—their emptin… a revision, cigarette and brandy s…
Most of the things you made for me… chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker… away to friends who could use them… be reminded of the hours lost ther… not having been witness to those d…
Sometimes the season changed in th… sometimes the state, but it was al… the Depression, and he was alone i… the train stalled beneath a sky wi… than any he’d seen so far, the fie…
There was no one to tell, so it se… in the lines of the house, in door… In the late afternoons that follow… what could have been someone knock… beat its body against the living r…
I think by now it is time for the… I imagine the field, the one above… house we rented, has lain in conva… long enough. The hawk has taken ba… above new grass, and the doe again…
That summer, we did not simply wal… the valley of the shadow of death;… orchestrating funerals for the ano… found dead: a drowned mole—its sma… still pink—a crushed box turtle, g…
The girls sit before the assignmen… blocks of salt—and from tall, prec… look down into blank planes of pos… though, the only choice is to carv… smaller. So they begin. Rough chu…
It was first dark when the plow tu… Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-rud… but itself, the tendon’s bored eye… a ponderous needle. And yet the po… of one end dared what was undone
The household sells in a morning,… they cannot let the house itself g… the near-nothing it brings at auct… the children, all beyond their mid… carry her back to it, the mortgage…
Bells sound them from sleep, and t… rise, recite all they have been to… of fire, the beds, nightgowns, the… They’ve practiced this escape befo… and know to close the windows last…
She had been a late and only child… already old and set; none of us ha… wanted to go inside that hushed ho… and play with her, her room too ne… We did encourage her later, though…
The camera is trained on the door,… in the frame, only the dog sleepin… finally, I see this was to surpris… filming your arrival, the dog’s de… six years distant, can this seem s…
This evening’s study the anatomy o… the greenhouse glows—jut of glass… of the science building—a small, t… thriving in its humid room. Wearin… lab aprons, they lean over the mis…
It began with the first baby, the… disappearing threshold by threshol… milky above the floor only her hee… the ball of her foot perceived. Th… was the crying; it had a low ceili…
How she must have dreaded us and o… than we hated practice, the lesson… her arthritic hands, the metronome… to us about the history of the pia… spinet and player had come across…
Some of your buddies might come ar… for a couple of beers and a game, but most evenings, you pitched hor… alone. I washed up the dishes or watered the garden to the thudd…
I sent you a list of what I wante… of strangers, or for the fire, the… have handled a dead woman’s posses… them, the clothes still fragrant,… of the body. Or perhaps your lover…
I have asked him to tell it—how he heard the curing barn took hour… to burn, the logs thick, accustome… to heat—how, even when it was clea… was lost, the barn and the tobacco
The forecast had not predicted it, and its beginning, a calming, rumb… and pleasant lightning, she welcom… of rain. Then as night came she he… relapse, slide backward into winte…