You who gave me birth between your sturdy legs are dead. You who gave me food and drink and washed my clothes, ironed my shirts, took me shopping for a suit and coat are dead, I alive, as if to bring you back to daily acts of dusting with the mop and bending down to…
For Beatrice Hawley and John Jagel As if the trees were not indifferent . . . A breeze flutters the candles but the trees give off a sense of listening, of hush. The dust of August on their leaves. But it grows dark. Their dark green is something known about, not seen. But summer twilight…
My mother’s house was made of clematis, I think. And Clematis is what Miss White calls Mother Ghost all day. She tells her what to clean, says, Clematis, clean this. But I know Mother Ghost’s her name and she made up three songs. We sing them every Sunday when Mr. Dearing visits. And when we…
It is a foreign symmetry, unlike anything in the earth’s surface rubble — the headstones, grouped by family to organize the sacred rows; the flowers at the fresh site are forced blooms with exposed glands of pollen and the widest throats; even the neat packages of food, each container marked with the names of the…
I have no photographs of my father. One hot Saturday in June, my camera slung over my shoulder, I take the subway from Greenwich Village to Chinatown. I switch to the M local which becomes an elevated train after it crosses the Williamsburg Bridge. I am going to Ridgewood, Queens, where I spent my childhood….
The day’s too beautiful; The Spring sun on the porch too warm . . . He’s restless; nothing can contain him — Not his books, or a whole house full of toys, Not even the hidden fortress he’s built Deep in his grandmother’s garden — For this is his special day. His secret love is…
“Like a boy,” she said, and opened her robe to show him the plate of bone and its center flower of black thread. Only flesh, he thought, the breast cut loose from its net of skin. And if she could not dote on him, he’d answer her bell in the bedroom where she is…
Mother said, "You know? – your father was an only child." The insight was not so much given as discarded. She brushed the sleeve of her housecoat across her brow. "You see," she gasped – and I saw quite vividly, although I was eight years old and still partially invisible; my invisibility enhanced Mother's soliloquies….
“But it’s only a cigarette lighter . . .” — Offering From the guarded hand of a twelve year old Whose father is unable to start the briquets. Oppressive July, the first of two weeks at the lake. Whosh! The flames leap up as the family scatters. “If you have a cigarette lighter I’ve got…
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