More on: Susan L. Miller

The first principle: Do no harm. The second: The air calls us home. Third, we must fill the bowls of others before we drain our own wells dry. The fourth is the dark night; the fifth a subtle scent of smoke and pine. The sixth is awareness of our duties, the burnt offering of our…

Imagine yourself an old wolf: lean and ragged, belly shrunken beneath a ribcage as bowed as a galleon’s undercarriage, shoulders broader than your painful hips, and paws the size of a lion’s. You terrify each living thing you encounter, voles and rats ducking into holes, rabbits humping their soft backs, propelled under bushes by back…

–after Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia In the garden, all the apples have returned to us, dangling gold leaf shiny from the trees, and under their bowers we walk, our drowsy feet crushing the flowers, carnations, pinks, violas, dahlias— All of our dead have returned to us, their faces wrinkled with the labor of the…