DarlingDante

For Summer Do you remember the night you dreamt you wore a wooden dress? You thrashed against the splintered hem, waking me, coverless, just after dawn. That is how we are love: confined in the grain of an imagined garment. We wake each morning, eat, laugh, and make love, all in an endless storm-wash of days. The silt-bound Sabine eddies and stirs near us, the riverbed clouded by bog-water, but mud hides few mysteries, and young nations hold no annals. If only we would be drawn to the new lights of an ancient city, a place so weaved of the ethereal that the sea moves in a slow wash of increments to reclaim it. I know wa

Bachman's cat would appear to be merely resting in the evening sun if it weren't for the bill speared through its heart. The Heron is tall as a woman, twice as cruel, and at least as beautiful. I brought the bird all the way from Florida as a gift for my friend, a pillar of living ivory to walk among his Magnolias. But already it's swallowed a dozen ducks, bitten several children, and now (the most dire offense) slain poor Francis. It will be shot and stuffed within the week, but beasts can't be blamed for their wickedness. When it flew along the banks of the Keys, it snapped up fish with the grace of sharpened wind. My deck

The corn rows are ripe with ochre and ashes. Countless crows shake the field with their calls while laying waste to the crop in a sharp-billed early harvest. Months before they saved farmers the labor of plucking grubs from the new growth, but country men are quick to forget favors, so Elijah, the planter's youngest son, stands beside me, the both of us armed for our own harvest. We have different aims: Elijah wants to plump pot pies with gristle, and I wish to pin wings forever on the page. I know the art isn't the animal, and their shapes will come out crooked and nefarious, their feathers robbed of the coppery hue of su

In the faint light of a roadside fruit stand two old men talk of weather while smoking, plums stacked behind them like sweet gobs of night. Beside the taller of the two, on the stump of a bolt-struck pine, a crow twitches its feathers in a makeshift cage of rope and twigs. The tall man's eyes are the feral blue of someone who's trapped the sky. The bird has a song like shook gravel. I half-heartedly palm peaches, hoping for the story of its capture, but the smoke-stilled conversation never drifts from summer rain. I fumble through the pears and berries, what soft collision of color, the taut and the pocked heaped togeth

Three days of Texas rain swelled in the soil of the front lawn. My father, digging a drainage ditch, held a rust-rimed shovel. The day was mostly gone. He struck deep into the rock-lined border of our rose garden, raking the earth, as if the drops could be mined and the mud forced to harden. A stroke nicked the hole-riddled stone and, like a surge of new roots, a knot of small snakes burst from the bone- colored mound, pouring out in chutes of emerald sinew. He cursed and swung at the fresh flood, severing heads, spilling the blood and poison of the panicked young. The grass quickly filled with killing, but as I, a small boy,

The brambled weeds that line my patch of lawn are full of wasps. My knuckles ache for blooms, but deep in brush a stinging sweetness looms. Though when plucked the petaled stem is gone, in verse its backyard brilliance could go on to root below an ever-rising moon. But flowers cannot grow in stanzas' closed rooms where leaves are only ink and no shade can be drawn. It's better then for beauty to be barbed than snapped by fumbling hands that seek to clutch a thing or fill a watered vase. No pen or fingers still the steady ebb of hard- won grace or ever halt the falling hush of absence, forcing spring to come again.

The gardeners stood slack-jawed at the sight of so many crates heaped in the hot grass then bent back the boards and saw the huddle of veined wings: dozens of bats, shipped from the east, were to be scattered in the southern garden like so many leaves on the night air. But the gardenhands mistook their daylight sleep for death and spread the Texas soil to make coffins of the crates. They heard no shrieks or beats of wings when shoveled earth piled on planks, and it took years for the men to learn that burial was a mistake. Mosquitoes still gather there in a thick, humming mist above the hollow ground but part when dark ai

Autumn had set fire to the leaves, and I too was burning with the shadow-heat of forgotten summers and the prickly sleeves of desperate memory while sighing in the sweet ennui of a southern town. To a young man, this is an early death. Counting feathers on a wind-weary heron or draining a can of beer in solitude quickly weathers wild passions. But, without the ivory stillness of resting under Magnolia trees, I would have never seen the hazy sunset shining on the river's boundaries, the sky drifting on to dusty distance, the far starlight's silver brilliance.

It's a wonder what can fit in a box: portraits, china, wall clocks, all sagging inside the wrapping with the sound of tape's snapping. Heavier are the things that can't: the first freeze and the tomato plant covered in knives of ice but tasting sweet when the blades dropped and you ate its meat; the old house your mother left where the child-you, lost, bereft, wandered through an empty room full of dust and fresh perfume. I can't carry those things for you. No matter the pay, and I need it too, I can't hoist the heavy load of living and have it to you by Thanksgiving. But I take my share with the rest: a forgotten cup, a