^{to Mary Rose}

Here is our little yard  

too small            for a pool  
or chickens   let alone 

a game of tag or touch 
football       Then 

again   this stub-  
born patch  

of crabgrass  is just 
big enough      to get down  

flat on our backs 
with eyes wide open    and face 

the whole gray sky  just 
as a good drizzle 

begins                   I know  
we’ve had a monsoon  

of grieving to do  
which is why  

I promise    to lie 
beside you  

for as long as you like  
or need  

We’ll let our elbows 
kiss     under the downpour  

until we’re soaked  
like two huge nets  
                    left  

beside the sea  
whose heavy old

ropes strain  
stout with fish 

If we had to     we could  
feed a multitude  

with our sorrows  
If we had to  

we could name   a loss  
for every other  

drop of rain   All these  
foreign flowers 

you plant from pot  
to plot  

with muddy fingers  
—passion, jasmine, tuberose—  

we’ll sip 
the dew from them  

My darling                here
is the door I promised  

Here
is our broken bowl Here  

                        my hands  
In the home of our dreams  

the windows open  
in every  

weather—doused  
or dry—May we never  

be so parched 

In the house off Constant Spring Road, the one
with the short spreading Julie mango tree  
in the front yard, the lime tree  
with their dark green leaves and delicate  
white flowers; the palm-sized  
burnt orange hibiscuses,  
poisonous butter yellow allamandas,  
I remember, I remember,  
how my mother’s hands kept moving  
as she produced one white crochet doily after another.
The slender silver hook and the fragile symmetry.
A Ford Escort was parked in the garage of that house.
Oil-slicked men tried stealing that powder blue
Ford Escort one night as we slept uneasily in the house—
Discussions began immediately about leaving 
one i/land for another. The fat  
balls of thread in my mother’s lap, at her feet,
those threads already unspooling, connecting one
memory, one life, one distant country to another.