A Partial List of Truths
With a singular love, with a lump of guilt & closing the door where she wanders without direction. The stairwell with its strangers who press each morning a tender word to the ears of their animals. Promises like June & with them the share of any lake, what’s given for the carrot, the white bone, the apple to its core. With birds & sticks & their merciful distractions. She wakes now & leaves behind the stillness of the floor, no longer needing to answer when the children call, no more nearness to those few, essential words, nor the painless nothing that was.
Knocking Twice on Wood
It was nearing the end of winter & we held each other at the narrow edge of the elevated platform. I’d published a few poems & she, she was painting & working on a novel. I was no good at making the move, hardly competent in asking her to dinner. The rising light catching here & there the dirt & grime on the cabinets, the oven door &, now that that life has closed, I’m hardly the hero of the story or, if so, my shirt turned around & inside out. These wilds—a grasshopper on the lip of the wide-mouthed jar—come as far as the screen leading out to the porch, to the citizens of my alley, to the almost lovers carving their names in a tree. Alone, there still rattles the train, taking us that first time to my small apartment where she drew a bath & afterwards, in our mutual haste, we flung every pillow & sheet right to the floor.
Before We Ever Lived
Back in the extraordinary dark, my wife & daughter sleep, the boy’s neck makes a dreadful angle into one of the soft pillows on the pullout couch. Outside, inhabiting for a moment this land called Pennsylvania, I hold my hand to the chest-high hedgerow & where the beach rose used to live. Queen Anne’s lace dappling the hill before the dull white flowers give way to a second, unyielding hill of planted flags. The grasses grow new, clean stones while no one looks & I’d like relief from the storms that hammer our eastward hurry to a crawl. Although we know the moon travels ahead without us, it’s easier to believe we will not fall alone when our bodies return their glimmer to the stars.
Self-Portrait at Twenty-Three
Running late after stumbling for the wilds of our bodies, sewing oats to borrow that phrase & so much rain in the forecast putting it mildly, righteously or cool. You choose. Was punched a time or two, you betcha, & I myself wasn’t always loving, thoughtful or kind, did not genuinely thrill when the century closed over those of us living there, i.e. a century of cigarettes & pills before the next stood up & took its rightful place. At the crossing gate, the conductor still waving from the window of her train. For what wrongdoing would we tie an arm twice across that track? What for a ribbon through the machinery unscathed? Lost too are the schoolbooks, the pillows as though in a room we never knew. There, I hung my clothes to know where the wind was blowing.
For Which We Have No Language
A most mothering shade in this sky, not for long & like anyone I’d prefer my evenings without regret. Neither am I here to complain for the walls awaken a word like water or is it the stolen image of a lime, make it half a lime among the oranges. I’ve spoken plenty for the flood of restlessness, having wanted some exception, to be exceptional minus the lopsided heart or lending my name to a disease. We’ve taken hours, wished all afternoon to float & know to what lengths we might keep our breath. To own the love of finches? That’s one way of beginning. To survive like a softened pear? The children come, believing the moon follows us alone. We hold hands briefly, again before not sleeping.
Where Dogs Like Flowers Play
The grown man cries despite the radio, the sun & moon, just this morning when his daughter spooned peanut butter for the dog. Those speckled paws, those feet that smell like Cheetos, but why pretend I’m not the one drugged & the truth a minus sign, the absence & lack, believing my books would somehow make this easier: another poem of heartache, a song best shared on the final, cruel drive. Each of us off to a land called Meadow, a cloud named Someday, a last goodbye christened Gratitude. So much daylight in a silver bowl, clean & dry, put away until next time & here, my god, these empty blankets.
In Perfect Lines Across the Deck
The sun, having lit all night the moon, catches & burns the veil of the clouds. The children, distracting us from outright despair, hurry after crabs that scuttle like thread between dying & not dying, flattening their bodies out of danger beneath the sand. Our heads they hang, staring nowhere while the doctor goes on talking, talking. This hole where the sleeve caught the fence & the hibiscus hushed, almost the same as yesterday. By degrees the brightness stretches the pastel of each house, the decorative fish & tawdry nets that drape the walls inside. The trailside thorn, how it smarts & these happy dogs, like old friends, running the length of the beach despite the claps & calling to come back. Valerie says she’d like to see our children graduate & the doctor goes on talking. Such effort to encourage the light. The sand sleeps patiently near the sea. The ocean makes its home in every shell.
Next Time We’ll Get It Right
Soon the mind concedes how ordinary the shame has become. One more grief lost in the afternoon holding hands & the stories of what came before or when I might’ve done a better job preparing, thinking for instance, as I predictably might, of changing everything like the quick & frightening accelerations out on the street. It’s true I refer to north & south as up & down, staying quite late in the bathroom until the troubles wander elsewhere & still such difficulty in saying bougainvillea or slicing the tomato on the cutting board. I put on your necklace just that once, & said at my very worst, Three, maybe six months. Half a sentence cast among the shadows of these butterflies.
Like a Country Western Song
Then the first day you don’t remember crying, then another passing beneath the trees, down the lamplit walk & into this new push of time. Then the keepsake of a pocket clacking in the hum of the dryer. A friend’s older sister, shirtless, jumping into the river below. Then a someday novelist & her dog knotted in a handkerchief on the end of a stick, carried in a scene from someone else’s life. A neighbor asks our daughter about the ambulance that morning at her home. Then like a sentence. Then the water wiped clean from either hand & promises, promises, promises. At the end of the century, last call, I told a tired stranger I’d put her in a poem. I remember now nearly everything.
Domestically Speaking
The pull of the bedsheet. The unexpected hardness of your bones crossing the room before opening the door. Without so much as a nod when the kitchen faucet drips, wears through the finish & then the sink itself, the tile below & beyond the underpinnings, the dreaming cicada, the taproot working its way down & down & down. From where the orange arrives in your hand you cannot say, same for the hurrying shadow of the only cloud for miles, one from which you’d like to draw your hands & drink. No more utterance but the will & last testament for your children, these strangers who spill as though out of nowhere.
Brief as It Was
Despite its grace, September bends a little cooler & the letters spill from their cards, the telephone ringing less than it did before. I am wading through the nowhere melodies until the strange, distant note forces the room. Afterwards a Kleenex. Afterwards the beach & all the waters we ever swam. The kisses & touch & I cannot, simply can’t but once again shoulder everything that’s happened. The leaves make their slow goodbyes but in the shady woods we smell the snakeroot & then see the flowerheads. We forget now the storm of feathers there at home among the daylilies. We believe, for now, we stand a chance.
God Made Dirt & Dirt Don’t Hurt
I’ve been drinking less, or trying, as the lights of the telephone poles blink out. The lock of your hair off with the mail to Los Angeles &, because I wasn’t there (or so I’m told) was spared. A missing sandal. The open house & school supplies &, despite my worst scenario, I didn’t know you’d be gone so soon. The scars from surgeries. The sky mostly clean but the oregano & purslane still wet in this latest retelling of what & why. My little glimpse sitting through that night on the fire escape with your friend from California. The plantain lilies, the beebalm & wild bergamot. The cardinal back at it in the maple tree & the same joke, this time told by the one left behind. Our boy, nine & nine-tenths asleep, reaches across the night to make sure I’m still here.
Ours Was the Room Upstairs
The handful of minutes alone at the curb, among the sidewalks & the dark circles of their ancient gum to where the retail giants soon will call it quits tonight. Surely, I could have a tailored suit or just stay home, rearrange the dozen coffee mugs in our cupboard. Long ago, I thought divorce might be the hardest thing before someone, somewhere, somehow ends up dead & the conversation moves to baseball, to weather, to anything other than the center of the spider’s web or the yellowjackets afloat along the edge of the pool. Faces in the changing leaves, this respite, the soured shape of the zinnias in your garden.
