and luckier.

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases 

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

by Traci Brimhall
Before she died, my mother told me
I’d make the monster that would kill me, 
so I knew this was someone else’s death
creeping into my field, butchering my cow. 
I recognized its lone eye and two mouths.
Perhaps it mistook the lowing for the call 
of its own kind. I didn’t mind the heifer—
she’d been sick for weeks, her death a mercy—
but her calf circled, refusing to leave even 
as the creature pulled out its mother’s tongue, 
fed one of its mouths and moaned from the other. 
The intestines glowed dully in the moonlight. 
The calf bawled. The disappointed mapinguari 
sat, thousands of worms rising out of the split 
heart it held, testing the strange night air. 
I’ve outlived all the miracles that came for me. 
My mother was wrong and not wrong, 
like the calf who approached the monster 
and licked the blood from its fingers. 

Nothing is ever over in a place

like this, which is one

Of the reasons why people come

to look at it. As an

Exhibit the waterfall is naturally

unsurpassed: part of

Its fascination must be in the way

it demonstrates how

an event can still be permanent when it depends for its

Definition on continually going over the edge

—Douglas Crase, The Revisionist