Excerpts
Lord, Make Me a Sheep
1 Brother Langston’s sermon over, we all stood. Every head bowed, every eye closed. A flannel-shirted lumberjack of a deacon named Joe Paul James was bawling and squalling as usual: O Lowered, Jayzus, Lowered, move in our midst, Lowered. Brother Langston said, I don’t keer if you’re a sinner man or woman or a holy …
Life in This Body
And those other images of the brain lit up— faces here, hand tools there, words heard, words said, maps of the body, feet next to sex, happiness glowing in the left frontal cortex, grief with no words in the right, fear bright in the amygdala, self here, consciousness of self there, and mirrors of your …
Titling Them
He carves the sandstone bases of the bluffs on the Nebraska side of the Missouri, following an abandoned railroad track across the fields to where a path descends to ease him zigzag to the river bottom. He turns on the trail leading through foliage, says, “Feels like walking in a church down here.” Says he …
Gut Renovation
Some people I have known left things behind out of pure haste and some simply because they forgot where they’d put them all. And then, there were others—like Faisal Hussein—who left things behind on purpose just to ask for them back later. Which he eventually did, but only after we’d found another home for them. …
Wet Light
After five days of autumn rain and early nights the wind-rippled surface of this empty street glimmering as clouds part for a moment has become the wake of a ferry I remember from childhood the shimmer of wet light on the deck as we crossed the river toward home my father with his arm holding …
Lullaby (with Exit Sign)
I slept with all four hooves in the air or I slept like a snail in my broken shell. The periphery of the world was gone. The giant exit sign blinking above my head. My family sings its death march. They are the size of the moon. No, they are the size of thumbtacks punched …
The Bear’s House
The town of Blackwell changed its name in 1786. It had been called Bearsville when first founded, but that name did not encourage new settlers. There were nearly as many black bears in the woods as there were pine trees, but there were also more eel in the river than anyone would have thought possible. …
Well, Millstone, Cistern, Cliff (1892)
for Paul Cezanne The cistern has run dry. Now the stone well, shaped rock and unshaped, collects sound, and what is beyond sound, the crackle of wrinkled stems curling to flame. Watercolor scratched, scraped to bare stock—trees, saplings, twigs. Roots and brush, windfall limbs and fallen trunks. Broken, unbroken ground. A tent of shavings, tinder, …
Making It Back
I left when a rose flush on the snow started the whole thing again and didn’t turn back till, moonlit, I was walking through a sub-zero night, the world’s frequencies low as I stopped to listen, then followed some moon- deepened marks like Braille going in and through me but I was lost, soon reduced …