OCCUPANTThe sad mailbox of my extreme youth, what did it ever deliver? The only...
A CRITICPick up your socks. Clean the house once in a while. Go to the dentist. ...
HISTORIANPiles and piles of books, boxes of documents, photographs, bones, shreds of clothes...
YOU WHO KNOWI was just enough bigger that I could wrestle you into the clean straw of the mow...
GRIFFY LAKEI spread my smooth water like a lap and caught the trees' faces where they fell...
EARLY MORNINGS
It was country so flat
you could roll a marble from Middlebury to Millersburg
they said. Sometimes
I woke in the dark hearing Dad holler
through cupped hands at the cows
like two or three honks on a horn,
cows' creamy voices answering back.
I was 17 and couldn't stay asleep
and couldn't get out of bed.
I kissed my fingers, remembering her father's couch,
our dense tumbling.
My Dad and the cows did their singing,
a gift for the sun's risings,
and I was lazy,
lazy and full of passion.