That Month My Mother Begged to Wait with Her in the Dark
under the blood red dogwood, berries crinkly as skin. My mother whose bed I’d curl into the whole year I was six, woke up dreaming of fire, doesn’t want to be alone. Between the car and the house, shorter than the hallway to her blue room where Otter Creek Falls licked the window. She holds onto the doll, the Lindberg doll I smashed in a tantrum. My mother who’d take subways at night all thru Brooklyn is afraid in the drive way of Apple Tree. Don’t leave me she cries like a child begging for water she’ll never...
Read MoreDusk at Preston Montford
Shropshire, England, 1983 First, the silence. Then, the green of poplars in a row like a solemn waiting chorus, motionless. The wood-and-wire fences, brick wall: borders marking edges. A silent Severn, wet line seen through boughs. At first. Then, the leaves at the top of poplars, waving in a slight breeze. Fresh cow dung, dried dung, green grass, dry weeds. Purple and white flowers. A wildness uncontained by fences. Down the path, shadows of dusk lead on to the River. The Severn moves in a gentle way: an angler’s plunk, the call of a pigeon, ripples of far-off cars, ferns...
Read MoreRaw
It’s like someone took an eraser to my executive function. I forgot to make myself coffee this morning. Coffee! Can you imagine? The one thing in my life that turns my insides to juice, slipped my mind. And the librarian had to dismiss me from the desk after she checked out my books. “It’s ok. You’re all good. You can go now.” Because I was waiting for something else to happen. Just staring and waiting. Driving home the trees with their thin branches pierce me. The fat robins jumping—I feel the weight of them. I have to clean out the mouse cage before my daughter’s birthday...
Read MoreSpring Came Early This Year
Spring came early this year, the robins arrived in February and the great mulberry tree began to develop its harvest before spring thought itself able. We wondered why so many nests and so many birds found themselves in the branches, but it did not matter— there were enough for all of us even after the week long rain, the cold spit, the great frost, mulberries everywhere, enough food for a season a season too...
Read MoreThe Garden of Ramanatom
I tell them about entropy—March buds ignore me— Boltzmann’s equation nobody believed, It killed him. Lawn’s growing verdant new hair— New strands shall wave at admiring chicks; the bald spot will vanish by June. (That’s not how it worked with me.) Each crocus emanating from old roots; morning glories shall hang from the trellis like a bunch of resurrecting kids— Rip van Winkle is a katydid, an old bug renewed by spring’s copy machine; even if a meadowlark devours him, his kin will look exactly like his parents, no rose would notice the difference. Like Dorian Gray, I’ve...
Read MoreThe Blurring of Edges
Much younger, first acquainted With certainty, it tasted as crisp And tart as a green apple, But its edges became precise, Interlocking gears, a vast machine. I governed impeccable itineraries, I tallied every petty minutia, Mortgages, insurance, taxes, Attempting to grasp water, Exceedingly specific molecules. Now, I have this urge To blur all edges, Debussy rather than Mozart, Monet rather than Ingres, The haze, the ubiquitous haze: A simmering August morning, Heat steaming off the dew, When the rasping din Of cicadas muddles the head In mesmerizing rhythm; When the fog is dense, Oceans...
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