Stillness, Waiting
If the trout died it would not be
as motionless as it is now,
in a current a man cannot
stand in and under which looser
stones go tumbling from their sockets.
Across its back it seems sunlight
is what’s swimming, . . .
Features
Lands of Lost Borders
Tibetan Plateau
My obsession with borders was born all at once in three different countries, depending on who you ask. I was in my early twenties, biking with a friend across the parched soda plains of the Askai Chin. For weeks we traversed this high-altitude wilderness, a land spread wide as wings, . . .
Read moreL Is for Leaves
Not to worry. Each morning
after you kiss my cheek
and lock the door behind you,
leaving me alone with my body
and this house to walk it around in,
I’ve plenty to do. Monitoring
the meat defrosting on the counter, . . .
Black Work
She stood at the window and watched me.
How long she had waited for me to wake up
I dared not ask, nor could she have answered,
her jaws woven shut by the undertaker’s twine,
a trade she knew well, having taught herself
black work by night in the attic, . . .
Still Life with Half a Coconut Cake, a Golden Retriever, and The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor & The Worst Peanuts in Town
Jack, today I played fast-and-loose with a bottle
of Prosecco and a coconut cake, and now,
an hour later, I’ve got my knees tucked to my chest
because it feels like someone’s mistaken my head
for an oyster and is shucking away, . . .
Two Characters in Search of an Essay
1. JK
He was always the smallest, in any room, “an Atom of a man” somebody said (the word existed then, although not in our later sense); but spunky, quick to rise to a righteous indignation and to support it with a whirligig of fists.
“Terrier courage,” one of his schoolfellows called it. . . .
Read moreFinding Emily & Elizabeth
My garrulous neighbor, Walter—a red-nosed U.S. Army Major (retired)—gives me books, volumes that he snatches up at the occasional library inventory purges at the University of Idaho, where I teach. Some are good, others not as good. Some I park on my bookshelves, others I recycle or use as doorstops. . . .
Read moreWhite Peaches
The white peaches announce themselves on the kitchen counter,
quick scent flinting alight the worm-eaten dawn,
the clean-edged note almost mineral, so unlike
the vague, pulpy yellow of girlhood:
the backyard peach tree bowed down with too much
sun-bruised fruit, . . .
Jules Verne Seeks Dreamers for Long-Distance Travel in Time
My father was on his long taxi journey when my mother said she might have a crush on someone. “Someone who doesn’t do quixotic things for quick money,” she flounced. In the year before the little shuttle I had been in real love. That boy’s rare blood disease made me overqualified in the matter, . . .
Read moreSecret Information
The other day, for no particular reason I can think of, I mentioned to my middle-aged daughter in conversation that I had been cleared for “secret” when I was in the army. Surprised, she commented, “I never knew you had any secrets.” But it is true, sixty plus years ago I was authorized by the government for “Secret Information.”
Why had this happened? . . .
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