The dog pawed out of the house and joined me
in fathoming the fathomless sky.

Last night, adrift, I asked my husband to read me a chapter of Moby-Dick, and so he read me chapter fifty-nine, “Squid.”

I believe in kismet. And because of kismet, the past year had me sitting in an olive-green W. H. Gunlocke chair, facing my desk in my office, writing a cookbook manuscript about the history of Black ice cream in America.

You waited for the sun
To parse the window frost,

For light to drift into the room
And consecrate the loss.

A fat white dog lay in the straw, flanked by a litter of pale pups. Their eyes weren’t even open. And there was white-faced Aya among them, wriggling up like one of the litter.

But they, too, have turned to saying what happened, only to suspect they really are useless, not only to an economic and political order that prizes adaptability and applicability but to fledgling adulthoods crumpled by their first real tragedies.

Facetiously but seriously, Marcia made us raise our right hands. Facetiously but seriously, we intoned as one: I shall make no changes. I shall not revise.

they knock at the windshield. We drive beside
the front gates and I refuse to look through
or touch a pamphlet which lists all you might

After what he’d gone through in the mine, I could see how, as darkness surrounded the trailer, he’d feel uneasy, maybe desire a wider space for a while. Like me, it wasn’t so much wanting to be in a particular place as avoiding another.