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Window: A Portion of the World
by Joseph Baldwin I am saying goodbye now to the scene outside the window: certain trees, a familiar tilt of land. Travelers through called it flat country, but we who lived here knew that it leans...
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Downpour
by Joseph Baldwin Raindrops are exploding into brief crystal crowns on the glistering asphalt outside my window, thunder is laying down a barrage, dullness and sloth in nature are being defeated, stale...
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Ghosts of a Summer Evening
by Joseph Baldwin He stepped out into the warm, caressing night, and smiles, remembering music and slim girls in bright flimsy dresses, smiling, sweat gleaming on their foreheads. And then came near...
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Creatures Interface
by Joseph Baldwin Raccoons live in the storm sewer — this I believe since seeing a great rat-rump near the entrance; the whole beast almost swallowed by that concrete mouth, suddenly a clown face...
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Geese, and the Boy
by Joseph Baldwin A sound like a bicycle horns, coming at us at rooftop level, rapid and almost scary. The six-year-old next door, stomping his trampoline and soaring again and again, cries to his...
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Cloud Picture
by Joseph Baldwin Images, images. Gull wings, cutting scarlet; sun fractured, bitten into new shapes. On fire, glowing fire, are edges of things, because of sun; and thunder-colored undersides sulk....
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Branch Line Local, 1923
by Joseph Baldwin In that part of Tennessee, the train rocked like a vessel on a storm-tossed ocean: outside, red clay banks rose and fell away with sickening surprise, green meadows humped up in great...
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Fur-Flight
by Joseph Baldwin I saw a squirrel launch himself from a perch ten feet above where the trunk of my elm forks to form a V, and leap across to the other branch, landing only a foot or so below his...
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Fontaine Fox
by Joseph Baldwin He drew cartoons that strangely moved me; the jests were in the foreground; the landscapes they were set in stretched on beyond them, wan and deftly true: the awful ordinary. Streets...
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Private Soldier
by Joseph Baldwin I am one among the platoon they sent to seize that itinerant preacher, rabbi, magician, or whatever he was. And, being pushed forward, first to lay hand on him. (Not the sort of thing...
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December
by Joseph Baldwin A raw wind bent trees, blew through people and houses, making them skeletons-of-the-moment; flesh reviving after an interval, but flesh discouraged, unsure of itself; siding, stones,...
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Idyl in a Willys-Knight
by Joseph Baldwin Other roads followed the level ground, but this one turned a corner to the right around a farmstead and its dark red buildings, and the car strained over to the left, then centered on...
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30 September
by Joseph Baldwin On the last day of the month, October came in six hours early, bringing a sweet wind out of the north running before rain. Spreading out over the plains was a blue-gray sea for sky,...
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Squirrels
by Joseph Baldwin Even when sitting on the lawn, squirrels seem perched: clinging as they do to ground as if it might sway in the next wind. Never are they less than tense, sinuously sleek. Always...
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