Mark Doty

I'm maybe four, and we live in a different big house in Tennessee, one on a hill, with a steep gulch beside it where my father's pickup truck is parked, down by the chopping block - a wide old stump - where on some Saturdays he kills a hen for my grandmother to pluck and roast for Sunday dinner. Still completely clear to me, the pale body of the hen, resting in an oval enameled metal roasting pan, black and flecked with little stars, as if the hen lay in the midnight sky.

The sea! It seems absurd to have a single word for it, as it never on any two days in my history of knowing it appeared remotely similar.

-from Dog Years by Mark Doty