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Wellfleet

This morning drifts of sand hissed along the shore like mist.

Whale Shark

We pull up alongside the great body. The fin marks the spot.

What This Elegy Wants

It wants to name the dead—without a name you wander lost in the sky.

What Would You Have Me Do?

We’d never had a cross word, but I’d never corrected him.

What You Mistook as Ultimatum

Wrung taut & tender at the soft play of fingertips, we breathe desires. Laughter takes refuge in bodies no longer coaxed to move. Nature becomes a thought.

What’s Happening

Where will we go and how will we steer when the cars are gone?

When Enough Is Enough: Age and the Creative Impulse

What about writers who come suddenly into full power late in life?

When Enough Is Enough: Age and the Creative Impulse

What about writers who come suddenly into full power late in life?

When I Knew Stephen Crane

If he could not evade a serious question by a joke, he bolted.

Where Are We Going?

I hightailed it out of the hospital like my ex-wife was a prison I’d escaped.

White Houses

I open the door and Eleanor is leaning against the wall, paper white.

Why I Don’t Want to Live Forever

I make a point of smelling the lilac every day that first week in May.

Will and I

When the doctors’ voices started turning to noise, I didn’t fight it.

Will Write Soon

I live for now in the second house of having asked a favor from a friend.

Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady at One Hundred

This is a novel that contains more than its actuarial share of falls.

Winter: Tonight: Sunset

I stop and look at the sky. Suddenly: orange, red, pink, blue, green, purple.

Wrapping Fable

At the core, a daughter is a self-reckoning emptiness.

Writing in October

The slow-falling leaves contain the space of the story I’m pursuing.

Years of Experience with Bows and Arrows

You’re supposed to hit is the bull’s-eye, that black spot, precise spot.

Year’s End

At Pompeii the little dog lay curled and did not rise but slept the deeper.

Your Ghost

She was painting a bedroom, trying to be a good mother, wife, Catholic.

Your Mouth, Our Prayer

give me a fish and I will make a necklace of its sharpest bones

Youth

The joy and anguish of youth, captured in two six-word stories.

Youth

“O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it!”

You’re Part of This Too

It was the way of the world: everybody wanted someone else.

Zee to A

Dr. Zee knows his son is struggling up out of some chemical fog.