In the Home of the Famous Dead电子书

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

From Women Who Marry Houses

On a Sunday Night in Hattiesburg

The Displaced

Alice B. Toklas and Moon: A Letter to Gertrude

The Woman in the Next Booth

Walking Down Prospect

Labor Day

The Black and Small Birds of Remorse

Silly Women

Settlement

Women Who Marry Houses

Act

The 875

A Lady Charged with Involuntary Manslaughter Says

Men

The Bessemer

Harlot Hag Dry Harpy

The Professor of Chinese Dialects in a Small University Town in Ohio

Something, Anything

Reporting Back

One Mile Out of New Smyrna

At the Vietnam War Memorial for the American Dead

The Bluebird Café

Before the Doctor Says What He Has to Say

In the Visitors’ Room

The Voice of the Radio Announcer

Works

The Menial

Things That Will Keep

Winter Room

To a Man in Kansas

Coming Back, I Visit Myself

Watching

Next Door

For T.

The Paper Xylophone

The Tractor Driver’s Funeral

A Woman Married to Grief

Remembering a Sunny Climate

Emerson County Shaping Dream

Audiences

Becoming Invisible

The House Facing Dahlia

The Day After the Bottomlands Farmer Lost His Wife

Stopping My Car for the Light

Between the Wars

After Seeing a Movie about the American Bombing of Cambodia

After the Quarrel

A Farm Wife Laments Her Husband’s Absence

The Other Side

Hearing Tractors

When the Buck or Two Steakhouse Changed Hands

1942

A Girl in a Sundress

Dancing Man

The Privileged

Progress

The Gift

Towns Facing Railroads

A Friendly Town

Burying My Mother

A Veteran of the War Speaks of the Enemy

Snow Comes to Pittsburg, Kansas

Edge of America

Small Town at Dusk

A Stand of Pines

Farm Wife

How We Live

In the Coffee Shops

The Dress

Farewell, Dusky Seaside

Item, Page Three

The Visiting Assistant Professor on the First Day Addresses Another Class in Yet Another Town

I’ll Be Seeing you

At the Marriott

On Catalpa Street

Buying a House

Homeplace

Driving Kansas

Rooms

Working Late in My Studio on the Second Story

Neighborhood

Dead Child

Most of the Time

A Bottomlands Farmer Suffers a Sea Change

Fields

Four PM.

Marbles

His Funeral

Surviving in Kansas

Story

Talking with You Long Distance

Packing

The Day

Children’s Children

Once in Winter

The Stump

In the Home of the Famous Dead

Her Last Trick

The First Warm Day

Remodeling

Growing Up on the Bayou de Glaises

Salesman

Humanities 113

A Woman of Substance

Catalpa

Blessing

Upon Hearing about the Suicide of the Daughter of Friends

To Her

Night Flight, Delta #481

They Agree to Call It Off but Then

Dropping a Line

From Darkening Porches

What Happens When We Leave

Nights and Days

She Reflects upon a Sadness

Circus

A Bottomlands Farmer Deals with the Arkansas Power and Light Transmission Towers Set in His Field

Radio

Eight Years a Ghost

The Time of Their Lives

The Crib at Buffalo Antiques

Spinsters

The Duplex

A Southerner in Kansas Recalls Trees

Just Off the Highway

A Farmer Dies

Fear

Air Midwest Lands on Ice at Kansas City International

Needing Noise

She Feels Out of Place in Burl’s Auto Service

The Young Dressmaker, Best in Emerson County

A Bottomlands Farmer’s Widow Remarries and Speaks of the Killing

Dreaming the Kin

After Vietnam/Standing at a Window at Gate 2

Many Mansions

After a Neighbor’s House Was Broken Into

Admission

Driving a Louisiana Highway, Past a Town with a Ruined Depot, She Remembers the Negro Albino in Her Hometown

A Picture

In Ray’s Café

What Part of Town Was That In?

My Mother’s Dead Dresses

Vast

How It Sometimes Happens to a Man That a Noble Heart and Purpose Come to Dwell within Him

Singer at the Farmers’ Market

Depot

A Story to Tell

She Ponders the Doctor’s Diagnosis

Everything You Wanted

Address

A Nice Town

I Describe to My Furniture a House I May Buy

A Bottomlands Farmer’s Wife Speaks after Attempting Suicide

The Road

Driving Alone

For All they Know

A Beginning

Buzzards Near Osawatomie

At Dark

Seeing Her

War Bride 1943

Baseball in America

The Suit

I Drive into a Town for the First Time

How Life Sometimes Is Like Kansas

Burying My Father

A Great Plains Farmer Beseeches the Lord for Rain

Long Lives

Dirt

Mockingbird

Telling Time

Dirt

At a Daughter’s Grave

Why I Get Up Each Day

Crossing

Standing at a New Grave

Houston

Metaphor

Indulgences

Glittering

This Morning

Kansas in Winter

Weight

Summer

Piano

Growing Up in a Small Town

North of Cabot

An Old Woman Recalls a Sea Change

In 1942

For Stephen, Who Owns a Bag of My Cut Fingernails Carried in the Mouth of an Eel Who Swam the Caddo

Kansas Town When the Sun Goes Down

Parlors

America

A Woman Remembers a Night

Boyfriend

Hett Mayhew Explains Why Belton Harris Keeps His Sister Gladys Inside

A Good Woman

The Ferry

Smoke

Kissing

Going Back

Ties

Having Just Met

Threads

Love Story

At Dusk

In Passing

She Returns to Remind Him How It Was When It Was Good between Them

Courtly Love

The Breakup

At the Azure Sky Motel

After Supper

A Second Cup of Coffee

Estate

The Good Hand

Evening

In the Office of a Leading Oncologist

Doves

Taking Chemotherapy

Waiting Room

How to Imagine How It Will Be When the Doctor Comes Out to Say

In No Time

In a Neck of the Woods

Grace

Cancer

Inheritance

At Summer’s End

Tempting the Muse

Who Could Ask for Anything More

Intersection

On the Brink

The Phenomenological World

Gratitude

Across Town

Privilege

The Order of Things

Mercy

Luck

The Night Clerk at L. L. Bean

Holes

Scorch

What We Need

Satisfied with Havoc

Stranger

Married

After Losing a Child

Watching a Grandson Play Little League Ball the Day Ted Williams Died

Mothers and Daughters

At Frog’s Trailer Park

Silence

Work

The House on Lake Ice Road

The Wait

Paying Attention

Honeymoon

Snow

The Aunts

Walking in Woods

On That Beautiful Shore

The Slight

Driving Highway 71

To My Daughter, Who Refuses to Meet Me Halfway

Dumb

The Crows of Mica Street

Straightpins

New Couple on the Block

Pristine

Cloud’s Lake

Snow in a New Hampshire Spring

The Boys from Brewer Bottoms

Taken

Flying over the Scablands, Seattle to Pullman

A Bottomlands Farmer Remembers a Ball-Peen Hammer

A Woman Tires of Hearing Acorns on the Roof

Dance

History

Balance

Blackbird

Tarantula

Mammogram

Taxidermy

In the Critical Care Waiting Room

Strangers in This City Where We Have Come Seeking a Cure for Her Cancer, My Daughter and I Drive Up to the Clinic

Coma

After All Is Said and Done

Dissatisfied Life

Snow in Arkansas

The Only Color Blue Should Be

At a Table for Six

Gurney

Dominion

Parallel Lives

A Young Widower Remembers

Visiting My Daughter

Things

The Widow Speaks

A Woman Speaks of Blue Skies

Hope

Suitcases

Mother’s Day

Ashes

Oaks

Arkansas

Rumors

Under an Arkansas Sky

Niceties

My Father Teaches Me to Bat

Sitting in a Late-Night Bar, a Woman Recalls

In Golden Tree Assisted Living, She Protests the Scheme of Things

Answering the Question

A Day’s Work

Index of Poem Titles

About the Authors