In Rexall’s, Middlebury
the dark booth held us like a cove. My mother put on high heels and lipstick. Fruit parfait in glasses, a sweetness. A comfort to eaves drop on the others talking. My mother put on high heels and lipstick. My father never cared if we had a real house where my sister and I wouldn’t be ashamed to bring friends. In the dark of the booth, I could imagine, someday, being a beauty My father never cared if we had a real house. My mother never wanted to come back to this town she eloped to escape. She went out with realtors for 15...
Read MoreThe Artist
My little son draws an ocean and above it prehistoric-looking birds. A ship with stick figure men in hats on deck. A sun with lines of heat spoking out. There is a small clump of land, an island, and on it a single palm tree. He adds one, then a second coconut which has fallen on sand. Now nineteen he sits beside me in the car, staring out the window while we drive to college. He wants to be an actor but there’s no room in my skull’s theater. He can’t see behind my forehead the big screen where he stars, a six year old sitting at the table with a father recently divorced who writes...
Read MoreTesseract: A Parent’s Guide to Time Travel
(with thanks to Madeleine L’Engle) A tesseract, you may recall, acts like a wrinkle in time Cinching together now and long ago or Right this minute and decades hence Like a pleat, a hem Or a cloth swept from the table All whorls and fluting, rapidly compressed. It’s what they nowadays would call a wormhole And say you need a warp drive to approach. But parents generate them just by being: Seed them with our breath Spark them with our glance Roil spacetime’s fabric with our every step. You know it from yourself: How the smell of chlorine can transport you To those mornings...
Read MoreHands
photo by Philipp Weissenbacher “The Kiss” by Auguste Rodin in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (for Verlena Orr) I would rather kiss hands. Hands have done everything: been cold and burned; caressed and braced against a fall. Hands are dangerous: have become fists, instinctively; gripped knives in anger, released bombs; hands have felt pulse and pressed desperately against wounds. Hands have worn paint, grease, the pungency of garlic, scent of fresh sex. Hands have been hidden in pockets, left awkwardly exposed. Hands have bathed children, lowered the dead. Hands have scars where they...
Read MoreHelsinki Love Song
Tonight (love night) I’ve married this city. A crow priest blessed us shouting words of power into her megaphone while we clapped and sang. Tonight I’m yours, my city, and everyone’s. Tonight I’m in love with all the wedding guests, my far-off flame and the priest, too.
Read MoreFollow the Flow
(On the calligraphy of Wang Xizhi) Click image to view larger TEXT ONLY VERSION How hard is it to reproduce the work of such a piece of gem especially when the original sleeps with none but the royal man who was simply absorbed by the sinuous traces of incomparable beauty and skill. How hard is it to surface the buried? The tip of this brush on the old track; the vibrant paths, the much mistaken routes. One needs to repeat the errors for they form parts of the entity. Sometimes words even fall apart to give one the nous of spontaneity. I know how it feels to step on each of the old steps...
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