oh fine. just fine.

From here, along the northern road, the oaks form a phalanx through which no pines dare grow. Bag worms hang in their cloudy white hammocks. This is the month of webs when long-bodied yellow and black spiders sign their autographs between the posts of pastures. I find them beautiful; you would rather not look. Mornings, before the heat returns, we take coffees out to the edge of the property. Indented rocks are our armchairs, and we sit and wait for the thrushes to sing their sonatas.  I start telling you about a dream full of wonders — scientists had perfected holograms and could project works of art onto the sky for all to see — but you won't listen. Dreams are nothing, you say, cutting me off: meaningless  nothings .  The moment is spoiled, and I take my coffee back to the house where I write the dream down, longhand. I phone your sister. We laugh and insult you, calling up instances when we played games (Password and Balderdash), and you change...

She is tall and pecan-brown, repeating a history course for the second time. It is not that she doesn't study. It is that she cannot write. She has been told to hand in an essay about the code of laws assembled by the Mesopotamian ruler Hammurabi and to give the reader a picture of domestic life with all its inequalities for women and for slaves. We pull up chairs. I breathe in her Bath and Body Works vanilla, read her paper slowly and aloud because the ears catch what the eyes miss. Her sentences are awkward, stilted, like someone's idea of what academic prose should be. It is slow going. I ask her, "So, what does this sentence mean, this part about 'graphing onto' another society?" It turns out, after several long moments, that she meant "grafting." I ask her to explain a paragraph that is convoluted. She has tried to discuss a portion of the code stating that women had to utter their grievances before being allowed to leave a husband,...

I just needed a little more time, a moment only, to answer Melek's question, though not to make up an answer. I had that ready. I always had the answer ready because the question was always the same. I needed time to compose my face into a mask of perfect submission. He expected women to be submissive. I turned away from the window and faced him, my eyes downcast and my posture stooped, and whispered, "No, my husband. I do not know the name of the man in the market who bumped into me and said 'Excuse me.' He was nothing. He was a nobody." I knew what his next accusation would be; by then, I could have recited this tired, familiar script in my sleep. "How did you know he was a nobody if you didn't look at him, eh? Did you raise your eyes and look him in the face? Are you my wife or a whore?" Cue the kettledrums. Cue the dancing bears. This was where I lowered my head and wailed a protest of innocence to be followed by a walloping sla...

I am still upright. Bone is connected to tendon, ligament to filament. I'm breathing, and breath leads to song. My brain is not just flesh, it is a canvas. As long as I'm still here, any poem is possible. Morning: I sit with coffee and good writing. Better to sit outdoors, let the dog take her desultory walks around the property, show the squirrels what's what. They take advantage of the feeders, using brute force, if necessary. Dog gives them the stink-eye and they shrink back into the branches of a poplar. Meanwhile, I wrangle word juice from the   Oxford American , sighing at photographs of blues musicians with  solemn lakes for eyes, reading a poem about birds aloud  to the audience in the trees.