In seventeen hundred, a much hated sultan visited us twice, finally dying of headaches in the south harbor. Ever since, visitors have come to the island. They bring their dogs and children. The ferry boat with a red cross freshly painted on it lifts in uneven drafts of smoke and steam devising the mustard horizon [...]

The blue forest, chilled and blue, like the lips of the dead if the lips were gone. The year has been cut in half with dull scissors, the solstice still looking for its square on the calendar. Perhaps the scissors were really lawn mowers or hoes. Perhaps God’s calendar is Chinese. As first I didn’t [...]

has not altered;– a place as kind as it is green, the greenest place I’ve never seen. Every name is a tune. Denunciations do not affect the culprit; nor blows, but it is torture to him to not be spoken to. They’re natural,– the coat, like Venus’ mantle lined with stars, buttoned close at the [...]

I Because we used to have leaves and on damp days our muscles feel a tug, painful now, from when roots pulled us into the ground and because our children believe they can fly, an instinct retained from when the bones in our arms were shaped like zithers and broke neatly under their feathers and [...]

In our family, there were two saints, my aunt and my grandmother. But their lives were different. My grandmother’s was tranquil, even at the end. She was like a person walking in calm water; for some reason the sea couldn’t bring itself to hurt her. When my aunt took the same path, the waves broke [...]

My mother’s playing cards with my aunt, Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game my grandmother taught all her daughters. Midsummer: too hot to go out. Today, my aunt’s ahead; she’s getting the good cards. My mother’s dragging, having trouble with her concentration. She can’t get used to her own bed this summer. She [...]

Oh, some folk think vice-royalty is festive and hilarious, The duties of an A.D.C. are manifold and various, So listen, whilst I tell in song The duties of an aide-de-cong. Whatsoever betide To the Governor’s side We must stick — or the public would eat him – For each bounder we see Says, “Just introduce [...]

A governor it was proclaimed this time, When all who would come seeking in New Hampshire Ancestral memories might come together. And those of the name Stark gathered in Bow, A rock-strewn town where farming has fallen off, And sprout-lands flourish where the axe has gone. Someone had literally run to earth In an old [...]

September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the Little Marvel Stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears. She thinks that her equinoctial tears and the rain that beats on the roof of the house [...]

“The past is a bucket of ashes.” 1 THE WOMAN named To-morrow sits with a hairpin in her teeth and takes her time and does her hair the way she wants it and fastens at last the last braid and coil and puts the hairpin where it belongs and turns and drawls: Well, what of [...]