Disgraced by Price

The crescent moon at dawn, sharp as tacks encircling dust. First the ducks, then a tired - a surprised - chicken. Dead leaves crusted with frost crackle underfoot. You are always you.

And never me? Hanging laundry one studies a sort of lavender blend in the northernmost sky. In my dream, you claimed you could not see what I see because I am Christian to which I wrote - in a tight-fisted script above your comments - question this. Emily Dickinson is instructive as always.

Avoid study, avoid rivers and also astronomers. Don't rely on luck to make the poem. I paused near the clothesline and looked at the moon before ducking back inside to make you coffee. In the distance, deer pause and breathe and at last step out from the shadows.

Narrative makes demands in at least two ways. Photographs resist the familiar structure. The penultimate reason for living is at last extended. We are all of us disgraced by price.

And yet, certain rivers - as certain landscapes - continue, or seem to. She wrote of my sentences, they are oddly reassuring, like distant relatives who have studied religion. Thus the moon comes back in, as it must, at my behest. And you, as always, so lovely, so inquiring.