The minister, humorous, describes their “shacking up for years.” I had tried on his caftan of sheer silk in the hall, thinking it was a bridesmaid’s stole. Our bride in swaths of pink, black— an abstract fabric that makes me think of walls in Florence or Rome, or Petra “rose-red city half as old as…
Because she feels her husband in this breeze Riffling her blouse and housedress, She's outside in the early days of peace. While the sun freckles her arms in Texas, Rows of lights glow on the British airstrips, And Americans drink tea brown as deerskin. She forgives the Soho whores, conjuring instead His high cheekbones and…
1985 Rain. Ten years since we have spoken. Since Ma's suicide, fifteen. Triage of families: who to attend to—the widowed, the childless, the orphaned? When you smashed the kitchen radio all the calm times you played piano went dead too, just another symptom, though you swept up before sending me to my room. On those…
Lee Trambath was a fifty-five-year-old restaurant manager, with three ex-wives and five children. He was a slender, dark-haired man with a trimmed beard that was mostly gray, and he lived and worked in a small Massachusetts town, near the sea. The children were from his first two marriages, three daughters and two sons, grown now…
While his head wouldn't clear a chair seat, the parents' voices traveled on a higher plane, circled like wind, though his mom often stooped down from her rainy mist of perfume to lipstick a kiss upon his cheek, and his dad hoisted him light as a ghost to play airplane among the lamps hanging like…
Father, this night As on so many other nights I envy you. Not as an infatuated child Is jealous of his father— When I was a child I desired your strength; What I saw as your intelligence; A thousand small skills That I have never made my own— I try to imagine The disintegration of…
Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty tree. Take a phrase, then fracture it, the pods' gaudy nectarine shades ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest and tail feathers. A musical idea. Macaws scarlet and violet, tangerine as a…
I am breathing Rachmaninoff in the unheated room where they slept— my parents, the piano, the winter bushel of apples. Over the distance Sister Cecilia is still whispering keep your knuckles out, Rachmaninoff pleads fortissimo, and Papa says keep anything cold enough and it will never lose its edge. So I practiced, peeling through to…
My sister is doing her exercises, working out in my husband's study. The rowing machine sighs deeply with every stroke, heavy breathing, like a couple making love. Even my humming can't shut it out. She's visiting from Iowa where the cold weather is much worse. When she was ten, I'd hear her strumming her guitar…
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