“And your mother, how is her health?” I asked the cheerful young woman who had come in for a physical examination. She was draped in a blue paper gown under which her naked alabaster skin seemed translucent. Her branching veins coursed like roots close to the surface as they returned indigo blood to the warmth of her core. She smiled, albeit woefully. “My mother actually died several years ago. She had a brain tumor… glioblastoma multiforme it was called.” I stopped writing and looked up from the notes I had been scribbling in her chart. “I’m so sorry.” The young…

Einstein sits and thinks under the dark trees surrounding a white cottage — where no war came, even during the years when young men flooded out from this campus, cold from tap like the beer they’d drunk at the Tiger- town Inn just before their first induction. He stirs, but no amount of induction can help him explain how these knotty trees survived pen-knives, like claws of a tiger, incising the names of loves pre-war. A stick falls to the ground — a muffled tap returns his thoughts from trees to absent men. The ones who carved their names were…

Untitled (ice cap) If you went to a polar ice cap as an explorer or whatever and found a woman encased in ice looking up, mouth open, yellow robe maybe she even has a shield would you, tired and itchy, think of her as an Ideal, fall to fighting your companions to the death over the hard cool promise of fidelity, or, sticking to your guns, circle the ice shard watch her staid lips and say it’s only science? — Untitled (humans) When humans are a simple glance in a museum they shine — Untitled (whalebone) Slices of whalebone gently…

My coworker helped her grandmother move out of her home recently. She was 94, she’d broken her hip and now had to move from a small house in the mountains to a residential care facility in the city. The whole family helped pack up her things and prepare the house to be rented. Like almost everyone who lived during the Depression, she had saved everything. In the attic they found a medium-sized box that was labeled: pieces of string too short to use.

In electric confrontations, the clouds gather, grow dark, and grumble their dissent. They lumber about like gravid beasts, heavy bellies aimed at the earth below; a slow dance that lasts for days. Then, like a crescendo, it rains. Not an unusual phenomenon in this urban area of the west coast trapped between the mountains and the sea. The geometric nature of the city provides a horizon of percussive surfaces in the form of concrete stalagmites that have colonized what once was a temperate rainforest. What trees remain have been landscaped into place. And water batters into the foliage, each leaf…