Sometimes at night when I shut my eyes, and sometimes, for that matter, when I cinch them in prayer, what flashes up on the walls of my mind is a series of three images. Like the dinosaur slides my daughter switches in and out of the View-Master, which, no matter how familiar, retain a capacity for surprise, the first picture emerges from out of darkness and is replaced by darkness before the next one, and then the next one, appears. Three deer ticks, each the size of a grape, bigger, are arranged in a loose triangle on a stone splash block at the edge of a house. That’s the first image. In the next one, three blood stains, dark, distinct, are all that remain. In the last, the blood on the stone has likewise vanished. Something or other has washed it clean. The sequence derives from a memory, or collection of memories, from my childhood in Tennessee. Why I’ve smuggled these pictures across distance and time, I cannot be sure. John Berryman’s line, “Images are the mind’s life, and they …