writing

At Alice and Henry’s farm, it is time to mate the sows. Henry even bought a home pregnancy test for them—it is inserted into the vagina and simply beeps, with maddeningly little explanation, if it judges them to have conceived.

In his response to my first letter to him, Charles Wright said of my own decision to write poems, “I hope it gives you what it has given me—a life.” I took this wide view from such a hard gazer of a poet as both balm and call.

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One big expectation of the murder mystery is that the payoff includes some answers, that eventually we learn the truth. The best payoffs are layered, too, so that the revelations include not just who did the deed but how and why—what the motive was, offering a bit of insight into our own natures.

For two years I’ve been walking into the tall grass to take snapshots of this field at the top of the “crooked mile,” a winding hill that leads into the shallow valley of swamp and stream in which my house stands, just past the sign that reads pavement ends. I use my phone. I want the rough eye. The note. The diary. The record. The document. This time, this moment, unplanned.