It’s the gray of canning season rain,neither cool nor warm, and mottledwith feeble light.
This black sedan lies on its topon the kitchen window sill, its wheelsin the air, its battery drained,the oil trickling into the cylinders.
It was not death we came to fear but her life,her other birth, waking remade from the womb
of that disease. One leg was withered, a dragging-
And for his human guests, imperial excess strainingall credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honeyand stuffed in a swan […]
The Plat Book
cast our farmand neighbors’farms as flat […]
We dug potatoes from their cabinets of soil, watchedthe belly of the earth turn over in its grave, a glimpse of fleshthrough darkening ground, roots and greenlings—then the plow.
The pang and clangor of pitch-dense woodin the stove and the odd, almost syncopatedpops of studs, joists, and rafters as they warm […]
In the alluvium ofthe hot afternoon,where the day’s clarities […]
At the lower fence line under the starshe hears what at first he takesto be the neighbor’s mare cometo investigate his apple pocket […]
Ruin
was rumored
to be rooming
up the roadwhere
a neighbor’s barn’dburned down.