She had been full of hope once,
she must have been, and
she had been grateful. . .
she remembered this quite clearly--
it is an arduous process to squander
such emotions, still, 
she had managed it.

The deer simply turns her head
away, erasing me
from her sight and thereby
perfecting the wilderness.

These days she waited for time
to swallow itself and move past
the details that were impeding
her descent.

Mr. Wilson's warbler,
a gold coin glinting
through half-lit fog.

We must examine the "in-between,"
we can't just study "this" and "that"
it's the "in-between"
that keeps us moving. . .

Somewhere between
a sleeping bag
and a sarcophagus--
trying to get the height
of the new bed
just right.

He said "goatique" instead of "goatee"
and
"handy-down" instead of "hand-me-down". . .
he said she taught him to laugh at himself
he said, "maybe you never really know,"
and she raised her eyebrows
"maybe it's a crapshoot," he said. . .
he said, "I thought we'd just settle,"
well, you probably know
what she said to that.

My rats--everyone on the island
has them--are hungry, bold, unafraid
of my threats to wring their necks
each time I rise from this chair,
but my husband has a different plan
involving waiting and a weapon
and an engineer's precision, yet I know
we'll walk into the house at dusk
with similar results.

There's a cabin
up on the hill
I've never seen
I live real close to it
do you know 
what I mean?

The carcass lies dismembered
on the freshly-mowed grass;
whoever built this swing set
didn't mean for it to go this way,
but where it stood derelict,
abandoned by its youth,
there's room for something new to start
and decades left to let it grow.

She remembers a life
that was once hers,
so far displaced
it seemed impossible
that she moved 
within it;
further back
was yet another
life, one which 
she could no longer 
reconcile as her own.

The web worm population
has exploded this spring--
even on sunny days now
we need our umbrellas to walk
under their medieval villages
when they're cleaning house
and emptying chamber pots
out their open windows.

For years I wondered 
about the souls of the dead;
now I know they gambol
as hypnagogic imagery,
yet, from a point of knowing, 
we all want to know less.

The ghost
in the garden,
the swing set
missing
its swings.