is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                                              I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

what I really mean. He paints my name
 
across the floral bed sheet and ties the bottom corners
to my ankles. Then he paints another
 
for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,
saying Oh! I’m sorry for stepping on your
 
shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels
of your shopping cart. It’s all very polite.
 
Our shadows get dirty just like anyone’s, so we take
them to the Laundromat—the one with
 
the 1996 Olympics themed pinball machine—
and watch our shadows warm
 
against each other. We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we
 
stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my husband grips his own wrist,
 
certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.

Love comes quietly,
finally, drops
about me, on me,
in the old ways.

What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.

The sky tonight, so without aliens. The woods, very lacking

in witches. But the people, as usual, replete

with people. & so you, with your headset, sit

in the home office across the hall, stuck in a hell

of strangers crying, computers dying, the new

father’s dropped-in-toilet baby

photos, the old Canadian, her grandson Gregory,

all-grown-up-now Greg, who gave her this phone

but won’t call her. You call her

wonderful. You encourage her to tell you what’s wrong

with her device. You with your good-at-your-job

good-looking-ness, I bet even over the phone

it’s visible. I bet all the Canadian grandmas

want you, but hey, you’re with me. Hey, take off

that headset. Steal away from your post. Cross

the hall, you sings-the-chorus-too-soon, you

makes-a-killer-veggie-taco, you

played-tennis-in-college-build, you Jeffrey, you

Jeff-ship full of stars, cauldron full of you,

come teach me a little bit

of nothing, in the dark

abundant hours.

I don't have much time. I'm an important person
to chickadees and mourning doves, whose feeder 
was smashed last night by a raccoon. Soon 
I'll be wielding duct tape, noticing the dew, 
wanting to bathe in it, hoping the awkwardness 
of yesterday (three instances of people talking 
with bear traps for mouths) never repeats itself 
and we all go forward as if to a party 
for a five year old who refuses to smash candy 
out of a burro. It's too cute, the burro, too real 
for him not to ask his mother, can I keep it, 
and when the other children cry, they're given 
lake front property, it works out, this 
is what I see for you, the working out. Think of the year 
behind you as a root or think of going to Spain 
and feeling sorry for bulls or don't think, 
this isn't the SATs, don't think but stay. 
Stay happy, honest, stay as tall as you are 
as long as you can using giraffes if you need to 
to see each other above the crowd. I have these moments 
when I realize I'm not breathing, my wife 
is never why I'm not breathing and always why 
I want to lick a human heart, remember that each of you 
is half of why your bed will sag toward the middle 
of being a boat and that you both will sag 
if you're lucky together, be lucky together 
and acquire in sagging more square footage 
to kiss and to hold. And always remember 
that I hate you for being so much closer 
than I am to where none of us ever get to go 
again - first look, first touch, first 
inadvertent brush of breath or hair, first time 
you turned over and looked at who was surprising 
you by how fully she was there.

It is really something when a kid who has a hard time becomes a kid who’s having a good time in no small part thanks to you throwing that kid in the air again and again on a mile long walk home from the Indian joint as her mom looks sideways at you like you don’t need to keep doing this because you’re pouring with sweat and breathing a little bit now you’re getting a good workout but because the kid laughs like a horse up there laughs like a kangaroo beating her wings against the light because she laughs like a happy little kid and when coming down and grabbing your forearm to brace herself for the time when you will drop her which you don’t and slides her hand into yours as she says for the fortieth time the fiftieth time inexhaustible her delight again again again and again and you say give me til the redbud tree or give me til the persimmon tree because she knows the trees and so quiet you almost can’t hear through her giggles she says ok til the next tree when she explodes howling yanking your arm from the socket again again all the wolves and mourning doves flying from her tiny throat and you throw her so high she lives up there in the tree for a minute she notices the ants organizing on the bark and a bumblebee carousing the little unripe persimmon in its beret she laughs and laughs as she hovers up there like a bumblebee like a hummingbird up there giggling in the light like a giddy little girl up there the world knows how to love.

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle—
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain’d its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

After the nurse has taken all the staples
out of Brad’s new scar, he asks me how many
there were, and I regret not counting.
This is the seventh surgery
since his accident fifteen years ago,
the hardest except for the first
because the doctor had to rebreak
the bone and start over.
We can rebuild him, we have the technology
is something Brad likes to say
because before all this,
he was a boy in the 1970s
who watched The Six Million Dollar Man.
The morning of the accident, our sons
were at swim lessons.
I was watching Matthew’s round head 
as he did his bobs, the water slicking 
his hair to his face so he looked like
he was being born.
I never saw him like that since I’d had 
c-sections and my own staples.
One of my last memories of Brad’s brother
happened at Staples.
They were leaving to drive across the country,
and we were saying goodbye, and it was late
and dark, but they were still going 
to try to make it to Montana,
and of course before they left, 
they needed to print something at the last minute 
because for them time was always something 
you could make more of.
We said goodbye under the red sign
that said Staples, and this stapled itself
to the moment so now when I drive by Staples,
I think of Terry bending down to hug me
for one of the last times before he died.
Brad walked into this room
on the same crutches he’s been using
since the original accident.
The handles are wrapped in blue tape,
and parts of the gray cushions are flecking off.
They are the Velveteen Rabbit of crutches.
There are many ways to be broken,
and Brad is all of them. 
After she was dead too,
I read in my mother-in-law’s journal
how grateful she was for me 
so Brad would not be alone.
I thought how prescient because now
it’s just me here with him, and the nurse 
who is funny and kind and fills up 
the room and makes us feel
like things will be all right
but is also almost done with the staples
and on her way out.

Seventeen years ago you said
    Something that sounded like Good-bye;
    And everybody thinks that you are dead,
                        But I.

     So I, as I grow stiff and cold
To this and that say Good-bye too;
    And everybody sees that I am old
                        But you.

     And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear 
    That nobody can love their way again
                        While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.

I wonder what I’d do
               with eight arms, two eyes
                              & too many ways to give
                                             myself away

                                             see, I only have one heart
                              & I know loving a woman can make you crawl
               out from under yourself, or forget
the kingdom that is your body

& what would you say, octopus?
               that you live knowing nobody
                              can touch you more
                                             than you do already

                                             that you can’t punch anything underwater
                              so you might as well drape yourself
                                             around it, bring it right up to your mouth
                              let each suction cup kiss what it finds

                                             that having this many hands
                              means to hold everything
               at once & nothing
to hold you back

that when you split
               you turn your blood
                              blue & pour
                                             out more ocean

                                             that you know heartbreak so well
                              you remove all your bones
so nothing can kill you.

One can find only peace in the sea.

I don’t agree. I think of migrants when I hear the sea. Is my anger justified?
A window, not eyes, overpours. Love of the world. Lonely and often fooled.
Occupied by health insurance and visas. Please, please recover. I thought I’d healed
her death but here I am, waiting.

Sink into memory of happy and together, which is a self looking back and taking
out of context the bright feelings.

Move forward into embrace. Loneliness moving with.
I was thinking of you (the word) and how it accompanies. But how too it can imply
distance—moments behind the eyes, fading planets, how people hold differently
the changing sentences and truths of being.

How in my late 20s I planned on traveling to a lover in another country but realized
the night before, my passport had already expired. I couldn’t take the pain of the
border, the disclosure of not being a citizen. Of being so in love I would have risked
detainment.

Something close to 2 p.m. now but really it’s later in some place I’ve never been.

I had somehow not remembered
that any number times zero is zero.
David said, think of it this way,
20 zeros are nothing. We were in bed,
teeth cleaned, night guards ready
on the bedside tables. His three pillows
stacked behind his head, my five arranged like a boat
to cradle my back, an almost orange
moon penetrating our window through
smoky darkness like a blaze about to leap
across an expanse of pine forest. How
did this happen? All these years together
compressed into this moment of repeating
moments, so many of them indistinguishable;
so few of them recallable. What does dividing
any number by zero do to that number?
This is sort of fascinating, he says, that you
don’t remember any of this. He rolls
toward me, glides his hands around my hips.
His breath is minty, the skin on his face, flushed.
You’re cute, he says, what else
don’t you remember?
I remember running into you
at the Albuquerque airport, honey,
I say, after not seeing you for so many years.
You wore black jeans and a black tee shirt,
a black belt with a sliver buckle, black
Dr. Martens; I looked at you, your jet-black hair,
and somehow I saw that we were about to combine
sorrows and joys into the terrifying equation
of two people equaling one home. I remember
being panicked, my heart leaping into an abyss,
then sinking to my stomach as I watched
what was to become the rest of my life
glide his luggage off the carrousel. I remember
every minute of each labor, each delivery
for both children, and how going into the birthing
room for the second time, I remembered:
pay attention as the baby exits, that final
wet sliding out of me. I remembered
to pause for one of the swiftest moments
in my life, a whole new warm body
joining the living.

when i can creep into our 3 am bed
slink into the sliver of mattress
you saved for me watch the streetlight
slice through the curtain leaving a streak
of fluorescence in your hair stare
at the ceiling and wait   maybe
you’ll steal back the covers maybe
you’ll offer me your leg maybe
you’ll beg for quiet then in a whisper
so not to stir the monster masquerading
as jeans on a chair you’ll ask get any
writing done?  no, read two articles though.

they say love is no different than large amounts of chocolate.
also, the cocoa bean will soon be no more.

^{for Carolyn Micklem}

It is the season of berries,
which could mean summer—
in Chile, Mexico, or Jane Street
where the creamy smell of biscuits
is Virginia to me. Dear one,
in your cotton turtleneck,
white as the hair-cloud
on your chirping head,
you’re the best brunch
hostess. You soften the butter,
lambent warmth, sunshiny in the overcast.
Around the handle of your gentle kettle
you tie the strings of the tea bags, afloat
inside in their darkening infusion,
buoyed by threads that tug
I am here, not too far away.
I am to pull you back to shore.
And you let us set the table
in the patio, in the back garden
because it is seasonal, a light sweater
would do, as we pour honey, conjuring
the invisible bees. You ladle the eggs,
open-faced, their yolks aglow miniature
planets, on my plate next to a biscuit
like a bivalve, the salad crisps
as autumnal air. Our talk rises,
blue steam, radiator heat, buds
burgeoning from spindly branches
while you listen, dispense, and sing
Aah, there’s more sweetness! And we head in
to the sink. You tell me to run the water
gently over the cup of raspberries.
They are so delicate, you say, mere
force of the faucet can wither them
into pulp. Therefore, as you’ve shown,
my fingers and hand transform into a sieve,
showering into cleanliness the acorn-shaped
lantern-redness with expert tenderness.

That evening we took a bath

and held each other in bed

a little longer. When the last,

slant of your face was gone, I was a train

traveling north China alone.



I want civil endings: let no lover ever leave me

at Wuhan Station in Hubei Province on a night

full of red neon and chaos, with bells and

chickens and no English, wishing me

love and good luck.

^{by Lewis Howard Latimer in 1890}

electricity, like air around us, seems impalpable, appeals
to so few senses. but it is capable of being measured,

because my husband leaves lights on throughout the house
as though placing bookmarks. at night, I waltz across rooms

and unmark his pages, twist knobs on lamps’ necks,
flick switches, power us down. this sounds like a complaint,

but it’s how we communicate: he opens the curtains, I close them
minutes later. he puts the dogs out for breeze and sun, I call them

back. I whistle, he picks up the tune, so I relinquish the song. discovery
of the familiar: the language of electricity, the incandescent patent filed

first, fine pen, labeled parts, application slapped on a desk for permission
to write the first chapter. every once and a while, I look up in this house,

and I find there’s not the right light, so I buy fixtures and he installs them:
cuts power, wraps black tape, twists wires until his arms are sore. I take

the victory and twist new bulbs for their first glow. as for the old?
each time, I shake them for the filmament’s soft bell. we happily

confine ourselves to this age of light. we understand the parts, the actions
upon each other—but without entering too deeply into their intricacies.

We do not suffer much now; it is over.
We wanted to forget; we have forgotten.
We tore our hearts with healing; they are healed.

You have gained peace, you who were once a lover,
The garlands of your sacrifice are rotten;
Your garden has become a clover field.

Only at times, in intervals of quiet,
When music gravely claims the twilight air,
And melts the sinews of some bitter thong,

Your heart feels something of the stress and riot
That flung it between rapture and despair;
Something awakes that has been sleeping long.

You say: I am so strong now, I could chance
To play with these old things a while, and taste
The occult savour that I knew so well,

Yet, what was this great love,—a strange romance,
A fierce three autumns, passionately chaste,—
Youth’s customary path, no miracle.

Even that frosty thought, so fugitive,
Shows what is lost beyond all hope to gain,
And just how far from love we two have gone.

We did forget, we healed ourselves, we live,
But we have lost essential joy and pain:
We lived; we died; and having died, live on.

Some of that August day’s long-dead delight 
Came back to me, as on a winter hill 
I saw red sunset fall away and spill 
Its scattered jewels on the lap of night.

We two had always been so calm, so still, 
That silence was not lonely, and despite 
The shadow deepening over snowy white, 
A warmth, as of your presence, smote the chill.

Whatever men may call the real, the true, 
This much I know indeed, that an immense 
And actual radiance such as only you 
Have ever given to my mortal sense 
Gleamed on the hillside and then vanished hence; 
And all that winter night the south wind blew.

                        has twenty-five floors. Its letters hum  
                       to pedestrians in large metal serif.  
                      From Floor 19, you can see offices across  
                     the street, suits dimming their desk lamps.  
                    Like all hotel rooms, this one’s asking you 
                   to cry. You wait until you’ve left the large bed,  
                  the elevator dings open and you’re on West 46th 
                 passing long October coats. Only there, away  
                from the cornerless dark where your lover sleeps,  
               away from the room’s disarming neutrality,  
              can you soften into what’s next. The relief  
             of dropping sad water on pavement used  
            to catching it. How steady the scaffolding.  
           How predictable its right angles. Under them,  
          the curve of your head gains balance.  
         Feathers continue their low pivoting  
        in sudden storm. On Floor 19, your lover’s eyelids  
       and shoulders open, the glass wall bends 
      to his length. Last night, while under it,  
     you could taste plaster, steel, ascension of thighs,  
    their blueprint drawn for reascending. Under him,  
   you understood there’s no safe engineering  
  for this much want. What will you lose, pivoting  
on 10th Ave? If you could tell him no, you wouldn’t. 

^{translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori}

Let’s love each other,
let’s cherish each other, my friend,
before we lose each other.

You’ll long for me when I’m gone.
You’ll make a truce with me.
So why put me on trial while I’m alive?

Why adore the dead but battle the living?

You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave.
Look, I’m lying here still as a corpse,
dead as a stone. Kiss my face instead!

It’s better to want nothing

more than a voice

to say what is sweet

what is sacred

but not what you can’t say.

The sky & earth sundered

diamond dust froze

for a child to speak at home.

Say what you must to the house

where your parents live/d

even if it’s not the same

door you remember.

The former house hears you

the land remembers all

buildings, homes, temples

and never forgets a foot

that traipsed over its face.

I’ve forgotten what I said

I wanted to tell you

but no matter

the wind says it for me

the wind says it for you

to know a secret

weather holds.

It’s raining again and on

your birthday

droplets are heavy.

Your lover has left you

an umbrella.

It is a kind of love, is it not?

How the cup holds the tea,

How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,

How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes

Or toes. How soles of feet know

Where they’re supposed to be.

I’ve been thinking about the patience

Of ordinary things, how clothes

Wait respectfully in closets

And soap dries quietly in the dish,

And towels drink the wet

From the skin of the back.

And the lovely repetition of stairs.

And what is more generous than a window?

Although there’s no Director of the Scenes
working especially for me, I bet
what happens is for good. Forgot my jeans
in Hong Kong; on a marble hill in Crete
I left a lens. Yesterday in Nepal
a boy got my glasses. Why do I lose
my things? Alms to the cosmos? When I fall
in love, it lasts a life, but I confuse
my lover, lose her, and walk for years
on fire. It’s good. Rain will surprise my heart
one day before I die. Theologies
despise possessions, and I feel no tears
for things—though lost love replays death. Yet these
words come because I lose. Loss is a start. 

And it came to him that the question was loneliness-

when he grit his teeth, rearranging
his bones

                and self in an easy
chair, which would,

                                      as he thought, trigger

the worry he might dial her in the middle
of the night
                    only to hang up before she answers.

Then there were the variations: the loneliness
he wore with— no, like-

               a good sweater— while he sat in restaurants
reading magazines; while he explained

his life to people he met on airplanes; what made him
stand at the window thinking, without irony,

the private autumnal heart
is the last leaf to fall …

what resolved into a fugue
of silence, counterpoint

                                                 of all he would

never fully describe. As in the night he said
he loved her: billowing stars; black leaves;
berceuse wind. A sky
of stars, leaves, and wind. He remembered
thinking, with her in his arms,

of loneliness. What should he say? That they
would spend their evenings in metaphor,

in a house of silent song? That there
would be children?

Pray, love, that it be so simple.

As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

It’s autumn, and we’re getting rid
of books, getting ready to retire,
to move some place smaller, more
manageable. We’re living in reverse,
age-proofing the new house, nothing
on the floors to trip over, no hindrances
to the slowed mechanisms of our bodies,
a small table for two. Our world is
shrinking, our closets mostly empty,
gone the tight skirts and dancing shoes,
the bells and whistles. Now, when
someone comes to visit and admires
our complete works of Shakespeare,
the hawk feather in the open dictionary,
the iron angel on a shelf, we say
take them. This is the most important
time of all, the age of divestment,
knowing what we leave behind is
like the fragrance of blossoming trees
that grows stronger after
you’ve passed them, breathing
them in for a moment before
breathing them out. An ordinary
Tuesday when one of you says
I dare you, and the other one
just laughs.

A few hours after Des Moines
the toilet overflowed.
This wasn't the adventure it sounds.

I sat with a man whose tattoos
weighed more than I did.
He played Hendrix on mouth guitar.
His Electric Ladyland lips
weren't fast enough
and if pitch and melody
are the rudiments of music,
this was just
memory, a body nostalgic
for the touch of adored sound.

Hope's a smaller thing on a bus.

You hope a forgotten smoke consorts
with lint in the pocket of last
resort to be upwind
of the human condition, that the baby
sleeps
and when this never happens,
that she cries 
with the lullaby meter of the sea.

We were swallowed by rhythm.
The ultra blond
who removed her wig and applied 
fresh loops of duct tape
to her skull,
her companion who held a mirror
and popped his dentures
in and out of place,
the boy who cut stuffing
from the seat where his mother
should have been—
there was a little more sleep 
in our thoughts, 
it was easier to yield.

To what, exactly—
the suspicion that what we watch 
watches back,
cornfields that stare at our hands,
downtowns
that hold us in their windows
through the night?

Or faith, strange to feel
in that zoo of manners.

I had drool on my shirt and breath
of the undead, a guy
dropped empty Buds on the floor
like gravity was born
to provide this service,
we were white and black trash
who'd come
in an outhouse on wheels and still

some had grown—
in touching the spirited shirts
on clotheslines,
after watching a sky of starlings
flow like cursive
over wheat—back into creatures 
capable of a wish.

As we entered Arizona
I thought I smelled the ocean,
liked the lie of this
and closed my eyes 
as shadows
puppeted against my lids. 

We brought our failures with us,
their taste, their smell.
But the kid
who threw up in the back
pushed to the window anyway,
opened it 
and let the wind clean his face,
screamed something 
I couldn't make out
but agreed with
in shape, a sound I recognized
as everything I'd come so far
to give away.

I have spent seventy years trying to persuade you,
to manipulate you with the poems I’ve written,
to remember my people as if they’d been yours—
to flesh out in evocative detail my parents,
my grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts—
knowing that one day I’ll be gone, and without me
to remember them, the poems I’ve written
will have to go it alone. I owe my people
so much, and I want them to enjoy—if not
immortality—a few more good years in the light,
my grandfather patching a tire for a quarter,
his brother weaving a rag rug on his sun porch,
my mother at her humming sewing machine,
my father un-thumping a bolt of brocade,
measuring for new draperies. Perhaps they were
for you, to draw open and see on your lawn
Cousin Eunice Morarend playing her accordion.

for seven days
we left him 

on the lawn
near a flower 

no english 
in his spine

just asleep 
like jesus 

he is a cloud
admit it

^{Co-translated by Natalie Treviño}

I’ll tell my mother to stop covering her feet
with the edge of night.

Ask her to promise me not to die in December
like my father did.

Imagine Christmas:

Gardenias with snow on their tongues’ tips.

Caged dogs licking winter
off their bones.

I no longer have stars in my hands
to light up the way.

Please, mother: don’t.

 

La orilla de la noche

Le diré a mi madre que deje de cubrirse los pies
con la orilla de la noche.

Que me prometa no morir en diciembre
como lo hizo mi padre.

Imaginate la navidad:

Las gardenias con la nieve en la punta
de sus lenguas.

Los perros enjaulados lamiendo el invierno
de sus huesos.

Ya no tengo estrellas en mis manos
para alumbrar caminos.

Por eso te pido, madre: ya no te cubras los pies
con la orilla de la noche.

Merry Christmas,
you are far away.

              Today I read

a story about a fawn
named Pippin
who was adopted

by a Great Dane
named Kate.

               Pippin is me.

Her baby spots
look like a white out
sneeze.

              You are Kate.

The white diamond on her chest
is exactly where her heart is.

              Don’t you love

how dogs are designed
this way? Don’t you think

              it’s odd
how humans haven’t
grown a new skin

to adapt
to our environment?
No tortoise shell, no chameleon
color. Only the emotional
layer. Let’s call it
the cry-a-dermis.

              Today I read

that when a cardinal
sees himself in the mirror
he tries to squawk
his reflection away.
The cardinal does not
migrate, packs no suitcase.
He has no need to load gifts
into the back seat
of the car and worry
about tearing
the foil paper.

              I learned

that when a bird
flies into your house
death is coming.
This is why nobody
invites the cardinal
home for the holidays.

Merry Christmas,
you are not here.

              There are only

so many things I can put
in the care package:

poems scented
like rose perfume
and toner, recipes for soup,

a clove cigarette
              half-smoked because
it’s too cold here
to finish it outside,

a clipping from the local paper
about a fight between
neighbors over shoveling snow
and a privacy fence
in the front yard.

I have so many things
to tell you.

Write me back.

I will tell you what
it will be like
               when I tell them to you.

The worst part of it is that I’ve forgotten your face. Or the idea that each tide was a slender finger pulling at these knots, loose end then left to work on another day. Lost at sea, love is a logogram: less than, fewer still, a word made nothing more than cauter-mark on starboard hard, port I left all those years ago. Sometimes, I dream of my own (sorry, our own) great-rooted bed, shaped from something still alive. Eurycleia means “broad fame” and that’s a sandy-pit, if you ask me. It’s an island beautiful as a scarred oxen’s back, sowed with lash and eyes. I saw something of you the other day in this glass of magic, vase filled with smoke’s children. There’s that dress you wore, I said to no one in particular. There’s that blue that never bled to red wine, dark in its never-nocked-arrow waves. And suddenly you’re the moon, again, lost in reflection’s sea. I follow the light to nowhere as I wander through the sipped sleeve. Because. Because you walked the stairs that night before I left, after we heard the rain spill like grain from a split sack. You walked in front of me, just above the cochineal stars, bright bald ember, fashioned still spear. I think of nothing else but you. It’s true. It’s the worst part of forgetting, all this remembering.

I draft this, dear kasama, against  
fish-hooks of hope. I draft against  
slow elimination. I draft from soft 
interior of riot. I draft syllables of  
known sadness, such knowing, 
such evidence, such kitchen table  
phenomenology of you reading this,  
of this reading you—on a rainy 
morning, I see you in a blue mask
& black hoodie delivering bags  
of groceries at the doorstep. I draft  
from collected stillness, restless ghosts 
archived in my veins. Consider this  
an intimate poetics of rage. Consider  
this rage divine refusal. Let us talk  
about such refusal. Let us talk about  
such dysregulation of promise. Let  
us talk about how much I miss you. 

Imagine you’re an astronaut stuck in outer space. And it’s just you. Only you. What would you write about? What

do you see outside your spaceship windshield? What do you miss? Who is your brother now, all those miles down? Where’s west? What would you have brought, had you known you would be out here, maybe forever, all by yourself?

What about regret? What if 

there are whole days where you don’t think of your hands? How closely related 

is loneliness to remembrance?—when you let yourself think about it?

Do the stars feel heavier now? 

Is there, truly, anything you would do over?—knowing everything you know now? If regret was a type of animal, any animal, what song would it sing in you?

Outside are all these tiny windows you can’t look through. 

Do you miss having a sky to throw wishes against? What did it look like last?—describe the blue. 

What phrases do you miss people saying? By “people” I mean: 

write about something small—but with great detail—about everyone you love. 

What blurs then builds a forest inside you? Is that too specific? Pretend 

it’s summer again and that you’re the fire for it—would it even be worth writing about? 

Would you, by now, meaning in outer space, and very much alone, want to replay the moments of your life you wished had gone differently?—Or have you gotten over it all already? What stage are we in? Is being stuck in space like dying and not getting to ghost-visit your own funeral? Which is the first moment you’d go back to in order to change it? By it I mean where the regret sprang from. Would you feel bad about the rippling? Is worry just a wider room? There is always a box in which regret will fit. After you tape it shut, describe the sound. Describe the blue.

To live without the one you love
an empty dream never known
true happiness except as such youth

watching snow at window
listening to old music through morning.
Riding down that deserted street

by evening in a lonely cab
     past a blighted theatre
oh god yes, I missed the chance of my life

     when I gasped, when I got up and
        rushed out the room
          away from you.

What goes extinct while grazing on memory’s lawn in the sun? 
When you said, “I’d cut my tongue,” I grew a callus over your mouth.
Once, I tiptoed to catch a glimpse of you though I was not yours, 
but there was recognition through the window, my eyes knocking
on cleansed glass, as I closed further into sleep, into preludes,
away from you. Why am I speaking at all when what’s unsaid
between us is a rosette of moth wings, beating in the sky’s eardrum.  
I don’t flock to passions when I seek you; if all was taken, who would you be?  
Still, I know what I sensed as I watched you swim out from under the bridge
trying to sip the Pacific. If it wasn’t for the undercurrent, I’d have let
you go further, but the hour was a cool blue cluttered with your lips.  
There’s a story you know: it begins with your right hand over mine, 
as I practice my handwriting: I lay my alephs here, like ripe fruit, like a home away. 

Easy light storms in through the window, soft
            edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s 

            nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone 
to pick with whomever is in charge. All year, 

I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
            Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh

            in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely

excited for the word lover to come back. Come back
            lover, come back to the five and dime. I could 

            squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,

a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.
            I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape

            of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt

and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.
            Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned 

            for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

              to the memory of Denis Johnson

The stranger bites into an orange

and places the rind between us

on the park bench.

It becomes a small raft of fire.

I came here to admire

the iron-lit indifference

of the geese on the pond.

The summers here

are a circuit in parallel

with everything I cannot say,

wrote the inventor

before he was hanged

from the bridge

this park is named after.

His entire life devoted

to capturing inextinguishable light

in a teardrop of enamel.

He was hanged for touching

the forehead of another man

in the wrong century.

The only thing invented

by the man I lost yesterday

was his last step into a final

set of parenthesis.

I came here to watch the geese

and think of him.

The stranger and I

share the orange rind

as an ashtray.

He lights my cigarette

and the shadows of our hands

touch on the ground.

His left leg is amputated

below the knee

and the bell tower rings

above the town.

I tell him my name

and he says nothing.

With the charred end of a stick

something shaped like a child

on the other side of the pond

draws a door on a concrete wall

and I wonder where the dead

wait in line to be born.

the train never comes.

You smell it anyway, its blue-coal
body. In August, the fringe sticky

with Queen Anne’s lace, you might
walk these tracks inside

gigantic noons. I walked them.
You might smash bottles,

start fires, watch clouds from
your back, breathe clouds through

the red sparks of cigarettes.
Take your first sips of bad

sweet wine, cry in a graveyard at night
with your best friend, a half moon

and grave dirt in your hair.
Have your first bad kiss here, like

swallowing a living fish. If you see
the older kids, run, god

knows why. They will chase you
into the waxy halls

of high school. Unlike me,
you will have all your music

in your hand, the best
movies, a phone that calls

everyone at once. Look up.
The big fires of June stars

are so slow and boring they will
keep you awake for good.

Swim the mucky river.
Wash your hair in clover-smell,

the swish of trees. The crows—
you can’t not love it

when they chatter the sun down.
Follow gravel roads

to screaming crickets
and beer, sleep out

on the hood of your
hand-me-down Honda,

wake up with yellow flowers
in your mouth. Walk the streets

on the first night
of fall, every tree swelling

with what I can’t say
and see in the lit-up houses

beautiful pictures
of strangers.

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

Lake Michigan dreamed me, I think,
in the winter of 1969, its long currents
combing shipwrecks and where

was my mama, then? (She was wearing
a red muumuu.) And where was my father,
then? (He was fishing for steelhead.)

No one dreamed you, stupid girl, the seagull
said — you came straight from the belly
of your granddad’s school mascot.

You wore plaid skirts and bruised your knees
and lived across the street from the motorcycle shop.
I remember dropping dimes in the jukebox;

I remember embers in the sand. Once I saw God
himself — a small boy running across the RV park
with a toy sword in his hand. I dreamed

we all lay down on the beach and the dunes
moved over our bodies. It took
ten thousand years of whispering,

but we finally slept. And before that?
the seagull asked. Before that I found comfort
in the fur of animals and the movement

of a boat on the water. I was warm
in my mother’s arms. Before that I was
a sonic boom over Wisconsin, and before that, fire.

Haven’t found anyone 
From the old gang.
They must be still in hiding,
Holding their breaths
And trying not to laugh.

Our street is down on its luck
With windows broken
Where on summer nights 
One heard couples arguing,
Or saw them dancing to the radio.

The redhead we were 
All in love with,
Who sat on the fire escape,
Smoking late into the night, 
Must be in hiding too.

The skinny boy 
On crutches
Who always carried a book,
May not have 
Gotten very far.

Darkness comes early 
This time of year
Making it hard 
To recognize familiar faces 
In those of strangers.

Peonies, heavy and pink as ’80s bridesmaid dresses
and scented just the same. Sweet pea,
because I like clashing smells and the car
I drove in college was named that: a pea-green
Datsun with a tendency to backfire.

Sugar snap peas, which I might as well
call memory bites for how they taste like
being fourteen and still mourning the horse farm
I had been uprooted from at ten.
Also: sage, mint, and thyme—the clocks
of summer—and watermelon and blue lobelia.

Lavender for the bees and because I hate
all fake lavender smells. Tomatoes to cut
and place on toasted bread for BLTs, with or without
the b and the l. I’d like, too, to plant
the sweet alyssum that smells like honey and peace,
and for it to bloom even when it’s hot,

and also lilies, so I have something left
to look at when the rabbits come.
They always come. They are
always hungry. And I think I am done
protecting one sweet thing from another.

I call my father during halftime when the Irish are on TV. (Family history: my father called his father from a rotary phone screwed to the wall.) It’s good to hear my father’s voice, to have cellular access to familiar sounds: his admonishments, his praise and anger. (Memory of bedtime songs he’d sing on his guitar: I sing them to my daughter now—Phil Ochs’s “When I’m Gone” and Kenny Loggins’s “Danny’s Song.”) My grandfather, who lived in Indiana, named my father James. I rarely think about it, his having a name—my father, James.

 to Tony Earley

Strange how I remember standing on a limb
that curved out over open space that fell
away down slopes I’d never climb back out of
had I fallen. And once, when I was six,
I almost left my mother’s car—outside a bar—
because I knew the nearby bottomlands
would reach the river, and I could disappear
from her and find another family—just
show up at some stranger’s door, be taken
in, and live a different life. That’s how
I thought back then—a determined little cuss,
I’m told, who hid my fossils in the snaky
roots of trees and sometimes climbed up
high inside a thick magnolia, where I
refused to answer when my name was
called. I think about the times I might have
died, my infant brother sliding from the seat
to slam against the floorboard, the car
stuck sideways down a ditch embankment,
the icy nights near swollen creeks and rivers,
the woods a child could lose his life in
trying to escape. I guess that’s why I
listen toward the farthest trees as if a prayer
were stirring only I can hear. Perhaps its
single word is mend, a word that all my
other words have felt a kinship with.
Evenings when I sit out back, I think my
thoughts have always been inclining toward
a self whose soul has found a place to be
alone, away from others I don’t trust,
content to watch the falling leaves. Dull
image—perhaps cliché—but I’ll take it
nonetheless. The truth is: here we are
inside these lives we sometimes do not
recognize, these lives we don’t deserve.
So many selves we almost came to be
never came to be. So many words too true
to whisper to ourselves we go on listening
toward. So many bridges never crossed,
others stepped back from. So much I’ll
never understand about the reasons
I survived when others didn’t. Years
ago I found a book, like a gift, fallen
between two shelves. Inside, someone
had penciled, Language isn’t sad but
meaning is. I’ve held those words as
close as any I have known, having felt
a pull toward nothingness, toward lack
of anyone or anything that might repair
my ruined thoughts, and just as often
I have stood in shallow creeks, waiting
on my world to end, assured I have no
place, no name, no face, no words to say
the source of what I’m always reaching
toward. I have followed driftwood,
imagined my own dead self assigned
to stir above the silt. I’ve watched
the motions course along through shadows,
soon to reach a bend and carry on unseen.
Still, I have a faith that what is next is what
the story most requires so that the shape
of time allotted, ordained to be, can then
reveal itself. Bend, mend—the echo isn’t
lost on me—and giving in to where I’m
being taken has been the way I’ve come
to know my life, to speak its mysteries.
My guess is such an explanation overlooks
as much as it imagines. I’m sure I’ve
simplified the coarser parts, smoothed
them over as a stream refines a stone
through centuries. I’ve left out what is
obvious to anyone who knows or cares
to know the fullness of my life. Even so,
once I hid beneath a car, half an hour,
refusing to be left somewhere I didn’t
want to be—knowing days would pass,
my mother drunk. I was caged and fierce
despite the gravel shards that scraped
my arms and face when finally she caught
my leg and jerked my body out. So many
times another story line became the thing
that almost did me in. My papaw
snatched me from a pigpen where I
tumbled in one morning while he milked
the cows. So many times I’ve wondered
what the reasons are for why my life
was spared. Curses were all around me—
guns, dynamite, darkening fields, coyotes,
waterfalls, snake dens, hard-driven men.
I stood on snowy hillsides and almost
turned to follow logging roads wherever
they might lead. I guess I’m saying that
I came to where I am by way of almost
going somewhere else. I hope you’ll see
how I have tried to find a word to hold
between our broken souls, a word no voice
has ever found that sounds like wind that
bends and mends the sage grass in its wake,
perhaps the Holy Spirit’s whispering
revealing countless mercies granted all
the times I didn’t see its presence leading
me to where I am, to who I am, this self
I never thought I’d be, who found a language
meaning can rejoice in—a kingdom I’m still
wandering,
                  the only home I call my own.

Where did the shooting stars go?
They flit across my childhood sky
And by my teens I no longer looked upward—
My face instead peered through the windshield
Of my first car, or into the rearview mirror,
All the small tragedies behind me,
The road and the road’s curve up ahead.

The shooting stars?
At night, I now look upward—
Jets and single-prop planes.
No brief light, nothing to wish for,
The neighbor’s security light coming on.

Big white moon on the hill,
Lantern on gravestones,
You don’t count.

I have always been vulnerable when confronted with Christmas decorations, and I am sitting in my living room staring at them. The lights on the tree are blinking on and off and I’m mesmerized. I have never been to a hypnotist but maybe mesmerization is the last state you enter before going over the edge into hypnosis. Maybe being mesmerized is the last thing you remember. It does seem to be a state all its own. When I was a child I did the same thing—watched the lights blink on and off, alone in the living room at night. The only difference is I know a lot more about Christmas now than I did then. I knew practically nothing then. My mother put an electric candle in each window, they were ivory-colored plastic, and at the end of each taper, near the bulb, fake drips of wax were molded; I loved the drips the most, it meant that the candles looked real to people inside the house, not just to people looking at them from the outside. What I didn’t know then was that these decorations evolved from the Jewish menorah, the Hebrew festival of lights. I don’t think my mother knew that either, but if she did she never mentioned it. And I certainly never contemplated the resemblance of a sleigh to a cradle. A sleigh is basically a very large cradle. The runners of the sleigh are what makes the cradle rock. Once there was a very eccentric man, in the nineteenth century in upstate New York, and when he was in his fifties he had a carpenter build him a cradle. I saw it in a museum, the biggest cradle ever made, and every night he slept in it, and when he entered his last illness he stayed in the cradle day and night, feeling the sensual throes of the cradle while somebody nursed and rocked him. I mean in the sense of caring for him. He died in his cradle, and the card on the wall of the museum said he was happy at the end. When I was a child one of my ornaments was a little red velveteen sleigh. I used to put a tiny doll in it, but now it is empty. I don’t even like it anymore and when I was decorating the tree I thought about throwing it away but then I remembered the man in the cradle and decided to keep it. My mother and father also decorated the outside of our house with lights. We lived in a different house every year, so it wasn’t easy—the length of the light strings kept changing. People who live in the same house every year don’t think about things like that, their dimensions stay the same, there’s no need to adjust anything, ever. After the lights were up on the outside of the house, my father would put us in the car and drive around the neighborhood, looking at the lights on the other houses. Sometimes he made disparaging remarks and sometimes in silence admired them. When he admired them he would make changes in his own lights the following year, but as we were by then in a new house none of the neighbors knew we were copycats. The most beautiful yard we ever saw had a snow scene with a frozen pond in the middle and life-sized figure skaters who floated across the pond wearing muffs. This was in Southern California, so everything was fake—the snow, the frozen pond, even the skaters were fake, and when they moved you could hear a slight whir under the ice—I guess it came from a motor. My father couldn’t copy that—I could tell from his face that he was defeated. In those days everyone had lights. Not a single house was without them. That’s one thing that has certainly changed. Today, only poor people have lights, and the poorest people of all have the most of them. At least this is true of the town I live in. There is one street that has the poorest people of all and at Christmas it is ablaze with lights, there are electric deer on the lawns and huge inflatable Santas, the roofs have more Santas descending in sleighs with reindeer, that kind of thing. The rich people think it is ugly, they don’t bother anymore and they worry about the electric bill. They try to live calm, natural lives. They bake all their own bread, they make cookies and cakes and pies from scratch, they make their own beer and their own wine and liquors and they grow their own food in the summer—and come winter, when they want a Christmas tree or some holly, they just walk out on their land and cut it. Poor people have to use money, they have to go to the store and buy food, especially the kind that is already made. It didn’t used to be that way. When I was a kid, it was understood that poor people had to make everything themselves while rich people got to buy things. My mother bought whole cakes at the grocery store and said we were lucky, not to have to make them ourselves. Now everything is reversed. If my mother and father were still alive they would be very confused. I think we would all become confused, eventually, if we didn’t die. Maybe death prevents a major confusion that would, if it were allowed to go on, eventually kill us all. When I was little, one Christmas ritual majorly confused me. My mother had a little ceramic sleigh that sat on the table. It was driven by a ceramic Santa and pulled by ceramic reindeer. Every year I had to wrap empty matchboxes so they looked like tiny presents. Then we piled them in the sleigh; they were the presents Santa was hauling. But they were empty, and it made me sad. My mother would sit at the table smoking, watching me wrap the matchboxes. Can’t we put anything in them? I asked. No, she said, they’re fake. Couldn’t we pretend? I said. That’s what we’re doing, she said. I mean real pretend, I said, but she just stared off into space and I knew the conversation had ended. One thing is for certain—I wouldn’t want to be a Christmas tree. It would be nice to be the center of attention, to be so decorated and lit that people stared at you in wonder, and made a fuss over you, and were mesmerized. That would be nice. But then you’d start dropping your needles and people would become bored with you and say you weren’t looking so good, and then they’d take off all your jewelry, and haul you off to the curb where you would be picked up and crushed and eventually burned. That’s the terrible part. Maybe that’s why so many people today have fake trees. They are quite popular. Their limbs come apart and you can put them in boxes and store them. You can have one of these trees until you die and you can pass it on to your children. They may not be real but when you look at them you can’t tell the difference. That always makes people happy—not being able to tell the difference. And happiness, to want to be happy, is the most natural thing of all. That man in his big cradle was happy, though I never understood why, when he died, they didn’t just saw the runners off and use it as his coffin. I don’t think anyone would have noticed; in the end, the difference between a cradle and a coffin is hardly worth mentioning, though then again I wouldn’t have seen the cradle later, in the museum, and if that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have kept my red velveteen sleigh, I would have just thrown it away. No, never! When it comes to Christmas, when Christmas comes, I sit firmly on the lap of Charles Dickens, and repeat after him: Welcome, Everything! At this wellremembered time, when Everything is capable, with the greatest of ease, of being changed into Anything. On this day we shut out Nothing!

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

I miss my magnolias, miss my maples, think
Where did they go?, think, Oh yes, to the past,
that place where everything goes and can I visit? 
No, but also Yes. And can I stay away? Also Yes,
but also No. And in the same way that languages 
only get simpler, people only get sadder. Yesterday 
at the dentist I thought Thank God for nitrous oxide 
and I thought Thank God for Dr. Rachel drilling away 
in my tooth but wanting nothing she does to hurt me.
I wish that were true all the time. That we all wanted
nothing we did to hurt anyone at all. My friend 
with a beautiful house insists that we call his pet 
a companion animal, which I don’t think changes 
very much, but I want nothing that I do to hurt him, 
so I call his dog a companion animal, and then 
I think Is that what my trees were? Not really 
my trees, but companion trees, offering me their flowers 
and then their leaves, offering me their oxygen 
in exchange for my carbon dioxide, not exactly grateful 
for my copious applications of neem oil to kill 
the parasites invading their branches but flourishing 
in the absence of those pests, the flowers
and leaves all I really wanted in return. I miss 
my companion trees, my flowering Jane, 
my flowering Brown Beauty, my flowering Star,
my leafy red maples, scarlet and feathery
all summer. My friend’s companion animal is licking 
my face and my friend asks Could you be content 
anywhere? And I say Yes, I can be content anywhere, 
but then I think Is that true? Of course it’s easy 
to be content at my handsome friend’s beautiful house, 
by his heated pool, in what might be a physical manifestation
of contentment if ever there was one. So I think it again 
on the subway, think it again writing e-mails, think it again 
making breakfast: Yes, I can be content anywhere,
but alas sadly: No. It’s not true. I can’t be content here
in my uncomfortable present, in my uncomfortable chair,
on the uncomfortable subway, at this uncomfortable desk,
in this uncomfortable classroom. But oddly, I am content 
to visit the past, to say Hello everything I’ve lost, 
to say I wish you could come here to the present, 
my lost companion trees. I wish you could meet 
everything I’ve found.

When the teacher asked the girl if there was a nickname she’d like to be called, some voice in her spoke right up and said, “Lee,” which was strange because no one had ever called her Lee. In her whole life, she had never known a Lee except for Sara Lee, the famous baker whose cheesecake her mother sometimes served to company. So when the teacher said, “Alright then, Lee,” she had to train herself to respond and look as if she really were this Lee character. Lee, she was sure, was a guy who rode horses — a cowboy-loner type. There was something sullen, almost tragic about him as if he knew he was not long for this world. The name never stuck, and by next year she was telling everyone to call her Amber.

I was five,
lying facedown on my bed
when someone stabbed me in the back, 
all the way through to my heart. 
I screamed & my parents came running,
my father carrying me into the living room.
We sat in the chair with the high sides 
like wings. I kneeled on his lap, 
my arms around his neck. 
My mother sat across from us,
saying, honey, it was just a bad dream.
I looked over my father’s shoulder
at the dark ocean of air,
at the colorful, iridescent fish.
I tried to explain what I saw. 
It’s your imagination, said my father.
The fish swam like brilliant magicians 
toward the window. Then they were gone.
My parents didn’t know death like I did. 
Or the fish, their strange beauty
my secret.