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Beauty Is Life . . .

Rain

Nixon’s resignation, Vietnam, Chernobyl explosions

You, All Of You

His palsied hands shiver as he twists the fishing line one, two, three, four times around, then threads it through. He pulls the tangle of line tight and drops the blue-silver lure. It swings between us. “That’s a fisherman’s knot,” Pa Peters tells me, and he chuckles and pushes his thick glasses up the bridge of his bent nose. “That’s how you do it.”

The Thin Pink Line

In 1994 I was twenty-two years old and had just graduated with a literature degree from the University of California at San Diego. Though I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career, I’d recently stood up on a surfboard for the first time and thought I might just have discovered my purpose in life.

Instructions

Making green-chili stew, answering an ad in the “Casual Encounters” section of Craigslist, writing the number 8

The Shadow Of The Whale

It is 2 A.M. on a Sunday when my husband, Brian, and I arrive at the emergency room. The waiting area is strangely quiet, almost peaceful. The TV overhead drones, and a Latina mother and her young daughter sit in adjoining chairs, looking calm and wide awake. I take a deep breath and step up to the admitting window in my slower-than-usual, wide-legged fashion. The man behind the glass looks down at my belly and asks, “How far along?”

Blood

A hockey rink, a volume of Anne Sexton’s collected poems, Planned Parenthood

The Things You Forget

You cannot remember winter. You cannot remember the way the weeks of gray stitched themselves together into a patchwork of cold, the sky the color of a galvanized bucket, and the mud frozen at the lip of the pond.