Shelter is the warm night on the deck of a boat that has sickened me with sea swells all day, that has settled late to let me sleep along with the others: kicked aside shoes, thick coils of rope, the stars, the moon, the steady call of water, the shape of my lover after he …
Very quickly there is the sensation of nothing underfoot, and the realization begins, and then there is the fear that floods the body as quick as rain in the river drives past the river’s banks: trunk and limbs can hardly contain it, until the sudden meeting, less than a minute later, of arm, back, butt, …
Into the windblown oats, a pattern is only there because two boys are walking in there; they are small green figures in the silver topped grasses, looking to find their way further afield. Bent at the ground, those damaged patches are what they skirt; they are not fast like the fox or aware as the …
Reaching into the bush, separating healthy branch from what is overgrown, holding steady what the other hand, with saw, will cut. The sky is blue, leaves are pale green in the drenched spring sun and that one hand holding the saw belongs to the world—firmly gripping what is useful for its work— and the other …
She’s up against her mother’s legs sucking milk. She’s walking the pasture just barely steady in deep grass. Look at her black reflective eyes— you can see the fence wires there, a line stretched across her sight. There’s her mother back the other way, swaying to the sounds that cows move to. She hears it …
In finger reach I kept you— as a small thing beginning, your hair weaving my hands to you, your hands knitting my arms— you were the beginning of growing, laced into the gaps I had, and then you were the how of growing: out of my arms but still no further from me than a …
Hyacinth grows up with its heavy head, so solid even with its dome of star-like flowers and fragrance lighter than breath. The wet ground is not far enough below it; it becomes part of the hyacinth’s appearance and breathes its own heavy odor. When the wind blows, it shakes from base to top and cannot …
Where I was born, out of the opening wings of my mother’s legs and into the hands of someone I would never see again, was a place I would not go back to, and later, a hundred times, a thousand, I was in my mother’s arms, like wings that folded over me, but mammal-warm. Because …