remember when greens of spruce
brought indoors
made us suffer the winter less?
II
What hurts
the most? The kept
breath? Geese
cutting the pond? I came
to know
in hard Texas heat you found
him,
back east the roads twice salted cracked
in places, I played on loop
carols of mystery,
O
magnum mysterium, then
acute ice,
and common rain
III
The sun on the avenue
is bright, veneers
of antique chests at the outdoor flea
shine like chestnut skins,
a gray sparkle lifts
from costume jewelry.
Knowing you are browsing
cheap Swedish furniture
makes me feel,
sturdier?
IV
I want to solder
the fragile things, pour
liquid alloy into me or
exit metaphor
altogether,
straw is just straw,
not hair,
not blond tin,
it’s dull and dirty, grass
is young under straw, breaks
capsules, the shredded
chaff becomes
dirt. I could
be these things.
Dirt.
Shredded.
Nothing seems
degradable. Memory is still
of you—morning, naked, peeling
a small orange over
a silver bowl.
My teeth hurt,
the citrus and the metal.
V
I try to forget you every day
but Lauren and I were discussing
superpowers and she said
she would like to have super strength,
I thought I’d like teleportation
but then thought telepathy—to read
your mind—but Lauren said ignorance
is bliss, I had to agree. We thought
Spiderman had it right with scaling walls
which made me think of Luc in Aix
who climbed building façades for sport,
often shirtless, Lauren thought
that was super strength but I said no it’s more like
super attachment and I saw the power
I kept giving you.
VI
I see you as a boy
at the community garden
lacing tomato stems, your hands
quick with twine. I watch
the direct daydream
of your stare, how
your green eyes cycle
light. You mind the squash curls
before you race out the gate
shoelaces wild on the pavement
snap like jacks.
VII
You say you need
time yet I keep
coming back
isn’t my heart
the dumbest kid
in the class
the dirty kid who
no one wants
to sit next to but he
reaches out with gum
and granola bars and
they scratch into his desk
with the needle
from a math compass
they ink “THINK SOAP”
on the beige enamel of his locker
he doesn’t know
anything better just
days when Xander
is absent and the room
falls quiet he thinks
in the moments
when chalk scrapes
a music of slate
a sparkle of white
dust it’s all radiant theater
this escape might make
him happy that the kids
love him and he
has good lunches
and he swings for hours
upside down from the monkey bars
his head pendulous
just above chipped-up
wood as his shadow
draws giant totems
on the grass shrinking
and growing shrinking
and growing for hours
he could do that
as blood charges his head
he might pass out
from the wild joy
he is a bell clanging
as if to call everyone
and shout this is all
my body can do
up this high
you can’t touch me
as long as I keep pumping
my skinny arms.
VIII
Chestnuts harden in spiky
green husks, my brothers and I
would walk the driveway
in our socks, braved it
under the chestnut tree
and you give me
a husk to hold
suffer its unkindness.
IX
It’s been five weeks
since I left you and I leave
the family brunch, pass
the hidden plastic eggs.
Today the tomb
is not empty, the stone
still wedged in. I can’t go on
distracting myself
from the smell
of burial spices
the disturbed earth, you
have not come back.
X
Fridays are the hardest.
Your body moves through
happy hours without
me, I can’t even
chart you,
I want
to see the lines
you make
on the map of the city,
if they cross the lines
I make, do we
create a pattern
unknowingly,
does my finger
run down the glass
at the table you just left
at the café on Dekalb? We are
no longer destinations,
single blinking dots.
XI
If I forget, remind me
when we drove
past the dry roadside
farms, remind me when I looked out
on the neat
wheels of hay, my breathing
hard then stilled, what you never said
when I wiped my face,
remind me of your
neglect and the long ditches
and if I forget the annulling
of the day, if I want a night
with you, let that car ride
remind me.
XII
Our first time back together,
magnets, my body
pushed into you and your eyes
rolled back. The second time
I stared at your feet
while I sucked you off
the small muscles
in my calves squeezed
and released.
The heart?
The first position of union, the second
something polar,
getting back to your place
that first time
was like flight. The second,
traffic at the bridge—as if the city
said wait here
don’t cross the water.
XIII
here take a universe darts of light a pan flute
chirps our ending song go now to the cedary wield of smooth
creatures of glabrous torsos caprine legs who am I
to clasp seedstorms barehanded mornings when the surf
clung to its mist stubborn I will make this break soft as skiff
on water gone in a sprint you sleek windjammer I give you
June’s tea rose heat island’s sagebrush summer and young trees
XIV
On the radio, bombast
of timpani and horn
from the Slovak Symphony, you are
nowhere in the glissando
the piccolo is
too bright
for you
in these passages
of fullness
you do not live
nor on the bridge today
midlake birdsong, glottal frog
that’s when I sang
to become hoarse.
XV
this morning water broke
over my shoulders
the shower was ice
the longer I stayed
today is a cold day
longer now after
the solstice more sunlight
and snow I keep you
alive even though I try
to kill you every day
PART THREE
FATHER
he’s dulled
my blade
sometimes I could
throw hatchets
look at me
enfeebled pullet
offer my beak
blunt the hooked
end
my air empties, ink
clots
when I think write
him
PHONE CALL
Have you
written her?
Many times.
What did you
say?
I asked her to forgive me.
But you don’t
have the right
to ask
that.
Why
can’t I ask her that?
You don’t
have the right.
AUNT PEGGY
Afternoon sun on metals, hubcaps
flash on Second Avenue, I’ve been
seesawing my feet on the edge of the curb
for almost an hour on the phone
with my mother, It just doesn’t make
sense, the subject always comes up,
I mean she’s had years
of therapy, she says years with such
exhalation her breath gets
reedy, I pick threads from my scarf,
Why can’t Peggy forgive your father? The city is
bright, winter is quiet, a pause
on motion, Mom, look at all she’s been through, Pop
then Dad, I mean, good god, her voice
tenders, But Tom, she ticks her throat,
don’t you think after all that therapy
she would be able to forgive? I can feel
a draft in my sleeve, it hits
the sweat at the bend of my arm, Maybe this is
her therapy. Treat Dad like he’s dead.
There is a shallow dent in the chrome
fender of an old car my image runs over
and warps, my mother is quiet,
I’ve handed her something new, she might
stand for a while in her kitchen and wait
for the dishwasher to end its cycle.
PICNIC, 1988
I don’t name his niece here
but I know she was there
by the potato salad. In a notebook
I sketched my house
and the giant pines, our front porch
green-black like lake mud
erased until the paper broke, shaded
shingles with new colors, signed
my name bottom right.
I let Aunt Peggy look.
I was young but I knew her life
was sad, she took
in her hands the brittle
sketch, her eyes tracing lines, down
the charcoaled driveway, her eyes
I will name blue, her blue
eyes, those glassy
empty rooms.
WARINANCO PARK
Shadows slide over
the fields, the sun
vanishes I think one black vulture
has eclipsed it, but
no, it’s quick clouds, dead leaves
are kites unto the heave.
The planes lift from Newark
crossing over the park,
over the clover leaves
of the 1 and 9, from above, the streets
are pale laces and the roof
of my father’s house,
a chip, a tiny smudge
over those living beneath.
SELLING THE HOUSE: INGALLS AVENUE
In the sun parlor after dusk
I want to turn the heat
on, the tall lamp is shadeless,
the new tenant knocks
his knuckle to find patches
of new plaster, my father turns keys
over, they chitchat, I might enclose
the front porch, make it a bedroom,
there’s light on bits of lint.
Another big family to move in, more
quiet pairings, I look out curtainless
windows, in a house with rooms
and closets that never knew to be
unlived in, for this moment maybe
a relief to be empty.
AT WINDWARD AND SHORE ROADS
When we sold her house
the pine sent down
its last dried arrows, the new owner
sawed the cherry still in bloom,
that holly that always snagged
her white perm was pieced
and bundled,
her new condo
has fresh paint, no mold in the walls, she’s far
from the bay where she took me
to push horseshoe crabs
back in, now she hears waves
of engines behind the huge oaks
beyond the parking lot
where the highway runs out.
WINTER BURIAL
When she died, early light
turned the curtains
to gauze. I wilted
spinach for lunch
the hours she spent
zesting lemons
whipping meringue
to peaks. We step
between dunes of ice,
she never
liked snow.
Its weight on a roof.
ELEGY
FOR TYLER
I know violin strings
you have to
make them
tremble
a quick hand against
the steady hill
of your shoulder
in the shallow valley
by your neck
thresh the horse hairs
of your bow over
the ridge and drag
back, full
as a field released
to a hurtling
a long falling
gallop
DYING FAMILY
I
At the church door
its heavy wood
in the treeless lot
I take my father’s
hand we move
over the broken rocks
turn their broken
sound we move
within the shadow
the spire makes
on the lawn away
from the door those
slate steps rain-dark
he passes his sisters
seated in cars
headlights on single
file I move my hand
over his back
another funeral
my father’s brothers
are dying his sisters
survive and want
him dead.
II
Did you see
when my brother
reached over
and my father
fell into him, hair
silver as winter,
his head
tucking under?
Did you see
the small quake
of his back,
my father’s
tall
body bend,
a peony
burst open,
top-heavy?
III
My father’s niece crosses to me
I kneel to her newborn
I think we’re all smiling.
We’re moving
to Florham Park, she says.
Florham. That word,
floral
and florescence, lawns
of snow and spring, a space
opening
blacktop becomes
field, no
manholes of City
of Linden, I watch
a burst seed drift
and land
in the bed
of her brunette curl, I almost
brush it away.
NEVER
Did it stop with me?
Yes,
I knew
it was wrong.
She adjusts the strap
to her pocketbook.
Never
to your children?
MEMORY
My brothers and I hunted
night crawlers in summer
folded back the ground
with large dinner spoons the metal
necks bent swans we sunk
our cupped hands below crinolines
of white roots found
quick rubbery coils ruby
under light dropped each
into an empty Sanka can
their wet bodies sliding
away from cold tin
my father says he forgot about
the other two girls.
At dawn the rain fills in
the pocks with mud.
MARY AND BOBBY
My father writes
to his mother who died