I have seen fog like this before;

the first time we sailed the Alabama River,

with its slow, aching curves.  Lost,

groping for days through southern steam.

This night, frail sounds die on shore, 

and we are left with our…

Olive dark, its deep-inked lines stone slates,

knit like a well-made roof, from feathered gills

down the carp’s length, to the hem of its tail.

A dragon’s muscled back rolls thick-skinned,

and is swallowed, hard, by the river’s mirrored top.…

There is a place I have never liked:

Jo Davis county, with its John Deere tractors

and three a.m. families, dirty for life,

and the Saguenay Valley, where French rings

from young mouths, and every family

has the history of…

We are sitting in my mother's kitchen,

drinking coffee and talking about nothing.

she shows me a box of knives,

the long blades reflecting her face,

the pale colour of her eyes

not mine at all.

she begins to tell…

She says she has nightmares about the killing,

then clubs a fluttering ghost of silver

until it no longer moves.

It is early morning, just before sunrise,

as she threads herself between the miles

of line coming up from the…

There is a faint cooing,

then the silence that comes with new snow

and dusk.

Buried in the hedgerow,

where the moss and dead leaves

smell faintly of earth,

there is an unmistakable warmth.

I know this,

without ever splitting…

Hen houses fill the meadow:

each a metal barrel dumped on end, 

lined into rows and deep columns.

Roosters stand atop the drums, their frames

shards of red and yellow,

or the luminous green of darkness.

There is only silence,…

Twenty years ago in Illinois

I lived my life in fields,

watching daybreak push

through barn walls into bands

of haydust and summer.

Memory ties me to weather,

the thick swarm of air mid-day

that shifts the fields into motion,…

Snow drops from the fanned branches of a pine,

the flowering cones asleep in ice.

A white-tailed deer backs into the shadows.

I remember fields like this:

christened with the tracks of beaver and winter fox,

my father riding ahead…