Jared Carter

It takes a long, smooth stroke practiced carefully
over many years and made with one steady motion.

You do not really cut glass, you score its length
...

If you were fortunate enough to live
on a planet circling a sun-like star
in the Large Magellanic Cloud -
...

One of life's simplest moments: the approaching of the first few drops of a summer rain. That it was coming, all along, and had been predicted since mid-morning, by neighbors pointing to the dark western sky, and by the agitation of robins, and the unusual silence of cicadas - all that was conceded, and understood, while the rain itself would be welcomed, for it would cool the trees and the houses and the grass, and nourish the creatures of the earth in its invisible and lasting way.

Certainly it was expected, and yet as I sat there reading, being drawn into a faraway world, I had entirely forgotten the roof and the porch, and the parched streets, and even the increased tempo of the wind blowing through the trees - and suddenly there it was, that sound, those drops scattering, nothing overwhelming, just the announcement, the presence, of rain come at last.
...

In a cold empty room, down
in the basement, the janitor
had rigged up an old buffer
from the shoe factory - it was
...

No, it's simple, you mustn't worry.
She won't mind, you'll see when we get there,
it will be all right. She's never in a hurry.
...

It was never anything we really wanted to do.
There was always so damned many of them.
When we went out to milk, in the dark hours
of the morning, they'd swarm through the stalls,
...

I like their stories about snow -
how deep it got by spring. And nobody
would eat tomatoes, they were poison.
...

To balance there, again, in the early dark,
three rungs up on the old stepladder,
afraid to go any higher, it wobbles so -
to reach out and find the first set-screw
...

Our favorite? Not exactly. Still,
you made the rain
Of yellow shavings curl and spill
from your rough plane.
...

The old stories do not end the way you were told.
Hansel and Gretel do not escape from the witch's house;
they decide to stay. Ali Baba does not emerge from the cave,
but enters a subterranean chamber that goes on for miles.
...

To the memory of Bob Lewis, citizen of Rensselaer, Indiana

Not particularly afraid
of Death, I have always
...

One

Not that it matters now, but Silhouette himself
was not an artist, as most people seem to think -
...

You, who stood there eating spinach
in the garden,
Seemed so noble. When God finished
making you, sin
...

Home-made candles, each consisting of
the pith of a rush dipped in tallow.

to the memory of my father
...

There is a grace in the way people do things, even the simplest tasks-
the dance with which their fingers encircle the chicken's gaze, coaxing
the edges of its eyes into paleness, their calling upon it to rest now,
their speaking in a way that acknowledges something common to both of them-
...

When you drive at dusk, alone,
after the corn is harvested, the wind
scatters bits of dry husk along the road.
A farmer has draped a groundhog's carcass
...

Prolonged exposure to extremes of sun and heat can cause madness, even death, yet there is said to exist one group of nomads who roam the desert unceasingly. Its members have never been studied; only one thing is known about them.

Before leaving each campsite they mix quantities of sand with colors extracted from native wildflowers, and spread out a series of vast, intricate patterns. Such creations are obscured by the wind within minutes after the tribesmen ride away.
...

Fettered to benches where the oars were broken off long ago, they had no choice but to row with their hands. While they strained toward the water below, the chains cut welts in their limbs, and the brine inflamed their flesh.

But in time their arms became elongated, and their sores were healed by the sea. Some rowed backward, some rowed forward, some merely threshed the waves. Always they struggled, new and old oarsmen alike, and the galley sailed on like a graceful swan.
...

Was it you I saw, out burning off weeds along the ditch
north of the old house? You I glimpsed through the haze?
You standing there with your leaf rake, your watering can,
you who woke up this morning knowing there would be no wind,
...

Sometimes the memory's gone. You get a call
for a country cemetery - no one knows
where anything is. No plat-book shows
the early graves. A man has just been hauled
...