—for a sculpture by Walter Allward In the hours after dusk, we deduce he plots the path of distant suns, waits unabatedly for Antares to...

We drive to the beach the day you’re released from the hospital, the pills afloat in your glass currently a memory taken by tides;   and...

After you left, I carved our initials into the stump of a fallen tree. I tallied its age before death, thought of its stunted remnant as...

It is colder than before, the other night I complained of chills, and frost embossed on windowpanes; that which they call cancer eating...

La pomme de terre, the potato, the earth apple, its womb a warmth of ground, unable to tempt the eyes of unfallen man. The apple, la...

You’ve stopped coming over of late, sensing I’ve crossed some sort of line, saying you want to preserve our friendship, this affection of...

Christmas with an ex-lover is spent whenever there’s time to spare, so today I invited you over, with the promise of friendship and...

My composition of song, for you, has been rejected, not because the sentiments were bad, or the structure of verse and chorus, but that I...

Tonight I will ask you to marry me. You will surely say I am mad, in the British sense of the word, and then laugh off my promise to love...

My daughter, all of six and bursting with a Big Bang sort of energy, zigzags across our fenced backyard, picking dandelions she holds in...

I sigh at the sight of the moth I find so lifeless in the garden, rarely noting its beating white in the days or weeks gone past, and my...

You never had a clock within your home, just a single metronome, keeping tempo more important than the time, its clicks a call to dance,...

Perhaps I was a ruthless Khan, vengeful, without mercy, who cut down peasants by the thousands, taking an unsheathed sword to young...

In this warmer than normal winter, the trees are budding early, in February’s rain instead of snow. I feel I ought to go outside and...

The isthmus was the adhesive always holding us together, like fraternal twins conjoined, locked by a crooked rib. And though it looked...

In the days and nights of my naiveté, when hope blasted blue in carbon cloud, the constellations stepped out of line, formed new...

The girl I would have married had we met is on the other side of the street, a walking blur I only notice for a second. And her hair is a...

My hunter friend, the one I haven’t converted to my “animals-have-feelings-too” frame of mind, uses a wooden decoy in an attempt to lure...

In the yard, you felt sorry for the slug that crept so slowly up the stem of one of your greens. Poor thing, it doesn’t even have a shell...

Before You Die, it seems, has been springing up in bookstores all over the place. “1001 Movies to See Before You Die” – double-faced in...