It might recite the weight of wheels, copy insults from birds, giggle at the tickle of rabbit feet or mourn the stench of squirrel carcass, at night quake when sirens scream “Bad News, Bad News, Make Way!” but today the pavement bares drifting snow and pleads for the sun’s warmth. Come spring the tar will…

Looking beyond myself, I see a man in the market stocking ugli fruit. It is too big, too green, too other, alien as a green brain, but said to be cherished by elephants, who cleave its pebbly skin open to reach pulp that holds the seeds. In what famine would it feed me, in what…

Imagine a blizzard, a sod house– layers of clothes, extra logs inside, fire stories and white bean soup. Hot tea, oatmeal. Best if you like the people snowed in with you. Firelight, candles, songs, cold feet. Chapped hands darning, knitting, whittling. No clock, only deeper dark and a guide rope strung house to cow shed…

Once I lived on the edge of a calm cove, tethered and sheltered. Ducks fed there; gulls cried offshore at dawn. I’m all asea, no oar or compass, a skiff adrift in muddy water, nothing to see or touch in a world shallow and deadly.