—for Cecil Allouise Knott, my grandmother: Those who love us are the best teachers. The blackened window fogs above the drainboard. She sighs and cannot see the holly berries she will pin to her dress in the morning. She brushes strands of blue hair with a rubber glove and scalds the knives and forks repeating…
October now, it must be snowing at that dead end where mountains' cupped hands held us up to sky. Here, a surprise snow I watch from your hospital window as I pluck dead blossoms from plants that crowd the sill. What aches as much as anything is the ruse of only weeks ago: you and…
I don't believe in ashes; some of the others do. I don't believe in better or best; some of the others do. I don't believe in a thousand flowers or the first robin of the year or statues made of dust. Some of the others do. I don't believe in seeking sheet music by Boston…
Isaac looked like the tortured priest in Open City, and we lost him decades ago. I remember two fat gangster types who had gone to his funeral and were bragging in the tavern later that they had picked up two good-looking girls at the mortuary visitation and had laid them, and I thought Isaac would…
A version of the modern mind: long drives, flat landscapes, trees close up (the present) or far against the horizon (the past) and fences strung tight as the future, middle distance. The effect of distance on the slow movement of landscape past the traveler, this variorum of the present: the family on long trips to…
The organ donor who smiles in the leathery dark of my wallet from a driver's license has already struck one woman— elderly, confused— who stumbled off a Somerville curb one January dusk and became a sickening thump, then a bleeding body cradled in the driver's arms until police and ambulance came. That old woman lived…
What can I learn from the hummingbird, a big thing like me? I hardly have time to study its flash, its momentous iridescence, before it disappears into the mimosa, sated with nectar. I admire the way the greenery trembles. I remember reading that this bird is never sated—its whole miniature life an exercise in digestion….
It must have been you whipping the sheets like sails in my face, when I ran between the rows of wet wash. You brushed my neck when I was yanked by a skirt hem from under a speeding truck the year I was five. You are the one I left a warm bed for when…
The stone walls had lost the stone life of Under-earth, and, against the air, set their mouths in a jagged seam. The sky gave no rich press of the pores of life, no movement like the womb's stirrings of a vein, a root, a worm. In this world of the exposed skull, rain was simply…
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