Retirement
He had woven out a net, had woven it with the measure of his touch and tongue, loose, exuberant, he had thrown it out upon the width of day, had flung it forth, had given to his time a tongue, had worked had lived largely on this earth; his emblems now are gone, his songs are sung, the children of his listening. He is a songbird caught in a net, its head hung down, a stranger murmuring to himself, turbulent,...
Read MoreOld Man
Old man in a near empty house bridge port to the sea— (mortgage foreclosure assured) late in his payments to life, sits in a lavender lawn chair meant for picnics or poor people— pillows stuffed under his bum like layers of sponge cake. He sits at a handmade wooden desk he forged with his own hands finished in lacquer with the edges of his fingers tips. He types prismatic words forced together like a jagged Japanese poem or something resembling a Haiku forgery— while 2 Persian cats, Tambala and Shebelle, meow constantly with passion with pain, with hunger— bowls empty, food dried,...
Read MoreIf… Dog… Rabbit…
(for John) The ‘if’ sets up the futile ground of possibility while the ‘only’ that’s implied underlines the ruefulness of being human, of being a mother, of having seen too much of what’s disguised as what is wanted. Sometimes it is the dog that is missing, or the dog could save the day, or the dog chases after the rabbit yipping its high-pitched joy only to return winded with a slobbery grin. The only answer to “if only.” When the idiom changes to if…son…motorcycle and the only becomes if only he had not inherited my need for speed, my need to risk everything to...
Read MoreMother Psalm 3
(a psalm of anticipation) Raise your legs, then let them fall again and again as though you knew turning over is just a twist and roll away. Do you remember somersaults in the warm recesses of the womb, suspended weightless like an astronaut on his tether? Sometimes you kick for long minutes without stopping, now as then, though the sensation is lost to me except in the dreams I visit between feedings. A few warm days and suddenly the icebound troughs of winter are as implausible as pregnancy. The birches go first, and the willows a haze of green and gold on the verge of...
Read MoreApril Fog
The wind picks up the day it’s supposed to rise into the upper sixties. Clouds boil. The pond goes pewter. Ripples dark as basaltic lava. You can measure light. by what’s gone, throwing corn past crushed berries, the only light and the bellies of geese tipped to dive for those gold beads
Read MoreOur New Given
For Paul and Maxine It is the precise moment between the given and the unknowable— the slip of time that, like an island, juts into view, announcing its strangeness before we know what is to come. We sit, the four of us at a table in a crowded restaurant on a clear spring day and in the pause before the words tumble fast from my friend’s mouth, I feel a sudden pull toward an inevitability that must be someone else’s, and yet is not. The brief silence before words is when the true knowing occurs— amid the gleam of sunlight on silverware, the white of the starched tablecloth, a...
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