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The Devil in the Clock

Robert B. Shaw

You come to me in thick old roots of night While trucks are changing gears, although you kiss Like a slack orchid tongue in Cairns, and I Can’t make...

The Better Part of Valor

Robert B. Shaw

A would-be body-surfer, eight years old, he fell in with the ocean’s mood of calm, reviewing each low swell as it unrolled before him its obsequious salaam. Crossing the...

Mirror Verse

Robert B. Shaw

Brightly it gapes at the room. Nothing can argue the glass out of its passive (but wait: impassive, call it) alert, ready and able to mate doubles in pitiless...

Sundial in the Rain

Robert B. Shaw

Patiently waiting for the sun to rise, the dial seems more dutiful than wise: the sun, already up for hours, seems a shrouded moon, so muted are its beams...

Parable of the Birds

Robert B. Shaw

They might be swallows. Barely to be seen, they come through what the combine left behind, dispersed, discreet, below the radar screen while burnished stubble gives them grain to...

Finding the Diary

Robert B. Shaw

Settling the estate, the lawyer said. It seemed too grand a way of putting it— bills to be paid, a bank account to close, and finally her mother’s house...

Wisteria

Robert B. Shaw

Here it comes again, after shimmering dead all winter, stretching, flexing, limbering, unleashing hordes of feather-cut leaves that look like dragon tongues, a silty river bronze, before they flatten to assume their summer-long, grass-emulating green. Gone...