OCCUPANTThe sad mailbox of my extreme youth, what did it ever deliver? The only...
A CRITICPick up your socks. Clean the house once in a while. Go to the dentist. ...
HISTORIANPiles and piles of books, boxes of documents, photographs, bones, shreds of clothes...
YOU WHO KNOWI was just enough bigger that I could wrestle you into the clean straw of the mow...
GRIFFY LAKEI spread my smooth water like a lap and caught the trees' faces where they fell...
THOSE COWS: THEIR DOUBLE LIFE
They come ambling around the shagbark stand,
up from the lower pasture and its smelly pond,
pretending random travel and no surprise
at anything: serene, duplicitous.
Heavy necks and rumps hung equally low,
they mime tame endurance of cold,
fake calm in blinding wind, weary ache
humble in their bellowing till after dark.
They hunch outside the window. Eyes
too deep for thought scorn what they see.
Cows come to the porch while we sleep,
flex massive lips around doorknobs,
heave their fat secret malice inside.
They shift chairs, shake the drawer with the knives,
crack the cellar door. Mornings, all adrowse,
things seem out of place to us.