OCCUPANT
The sad mailbox of my extreme youth, what did it ever deliver? The only...

A CRITIC
Pick up your socks. Clean the house once in a while. Go to the dentist. ...

HISTORIAN
Piles and piles of books, boxes of documents, photographs, bones, shreds of clothes...

YOU WHO KNOW
I was just enough bigger that I could wrestle you into the clean straw of the mow...

GRIFFY LAKE
I spread my smooth water like a lap and caught the trees' faces where they fell...

MEMORIAL DAY: DIGGING THE GARDEN

Just less than spade deep
I scrape a slab of limestone
with shapely, squared-off corners,
level side upmost
in the dark clay. It nests
in the dirt, weighty, permeable, settled.
I heave it up,
it skins the prints from my fingers,
I am in a cool sweat of work now.
I lift the stone to my cheek
and press against its gritty plane.
A treasure from someone else's life.