I sat in a crowded place away from you at dinner and did not pray you’d come near: did not imagine the hall our private room; did not want to approach you with an air of feigned indifference, leaving my meal- time companions behind; did not conspire alone to lure you into talk, to feel…
Kneeling last night as children sometimes do, After scrubbing off the filth of the day, Undressed at my bed I bent and prayed For some warm dream, for some comforting sooth To say, In the morning, arise. My sleep was elusive, as it often can be, The starry firmament of self reproach Circumnavigating this shabby…
1. The Sandbox We celebrated a funeral for a dead ladybug and smoothed the surface with the belly of a spoon. Who would count the tiny dots now, or study the long crawl and sudden flight? We dug a pit for a hemlock leaf curled into itself. We said last rites for a fleck of…
Last night I walked in a field. The moon lit the snow: snow gray as the moon. And tried to remember your face—Luna Moth, circling the cold flame of the moon. At the same moment you looked up, protracting the old angle: self, secret-love, and the moon. The earth was young too. But what’s left…
To an outsider, the grieving at the Burns Bungalows looked like revels. Mrs. Oates, the registered guest, counted five men climbing the hill to the main office with six-packs of beer in each hand. Women came, too, bearing plates covered with dishtowels, babies, or crock pots in their arms, or long bottles wrapped in paper…
For a week it’s been spinning the tale of a thing about to believe its new body. Today the eyes are gone, the center split where form sidestepped its own riven length. That’s just likeness hinged to the tree. A souvenir. A transparency. To find it now make a space in the ear in the…
He brought vanilla candles. Some gift. My mother squeezed them into old silver on the mantle and lit each one. They scorched the wall. Even our best sofas couldn’t make up for the cheesy, rundown way the wall looked now. Still, this was London, not New York, and my mother didn’t even seem to notice….
It sounded like eternity—the sun’s interminable plucking, plucking, plucking at the water’s strings, their one continuous chord. It was torment to witness this devotion to an instrument, knowing he’d lost his touch, knowing the skills in the bone plectrum of his neck fell short of the sun’s flash and dazzle. But—no. That was illusion: the…
Because the world insists on still giving and giving at six, mastering addition seemed its natural complement, a kind of cataloguing the earth’s surplus. I loved the fat green pencil shedding graphite as I pressed rounded threes, looping eights into the speckled yellow newsprint. Loved, too, the sturdy, crossed bars of the plus sign, carrying…
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