One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: at a street light, a man in a wool cap, yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window; he says, Please. By the time...Learn More

The dead can't hear us when we talk: there isn't air thin enough for our words, solid as they are, to get through that sieve light makes. Static of light. Static of salt. And we can't hear them, either: sometimes they try to speak to us, but when they open their mouths, light comes out. They are fisherman who have stepped out of their...Learn More

I love to feel as if I’m just another body, a breather along with the others: blackbirds taking sips of air, garter snakes lapping it up with their split tongues, and all those plants that open and close and throw up streamers of oxygen: maybe that cottonwood that tilts across the creekbed is the very one that just sucked up carbon dioxide and let...Learn More