I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

In the end, tree, a cloudy shelter will come 

to cover your dry, aged branches.

It will lend you, short on green,

the white glow of its weightlessness

As a drop undoes the cloud into tears

I’ll tell my children:

no, the tree didn’t die,

your childhood sun has set.

My grandmother is only one day

into her infirmity and doped up

on Morphine. Her shoulder is immobile

beneath layers of plaster.

Her eighty-five-year-old frame droops

from the weight of it.

My mother confesses:

she cannot take care of her mother.

I am not she says a nursemaid.

My mother is angry. Angry

at my sister who didn’t give enough

support, angry at my grandmother

for shuffling her feet, angry even

at the dog that was tucked beneath

my grandmother’s arm

as they all three tried to squeeze

into the door of the vet’s office.

She calls me from the emergency room

to say that grandmother fractured her shoulder

in three places. She’s become an invalid

overnight, she says. My sister calls her cruel

for refusing to run the bathwater, refusing

to wash my grandmother’s naked body, for

not even considering renting

a wheelchair for her to move from place

to place. When grandmother whispers

that she is afraid to walk, my mother

tells her that there’s nothing wrong with

her legs, tells her she’ll have to go to a

nursing home if she won’t walk

to the bathroom: one piss in the bed is

understandable, two is teetering too

close to in-home care.

My sister does not understand that there

is too much to overcome between them—

always the memory of the black dress

grandmother refused to wear

on the day of her husband’s funeral—

the way she turned to my mother and said,

I am not in mourning.

^{Do you know what I was, how I lived? —Louise Glück}

It is a goldfinch
one of the two
 
small girls,
both daughters
 
of a friend,
sees hit the window
 
and fall into the fern.
No one hears
 
the small thump but she,
the youngest, sees
 
the flash of gold
against the mica sky
 
as the limp feathered envelope
crumples into the green.
 
How many times
in a life will we witness
 
the very moment of death?
She wants a box
 
and a small towel
some kind of comfort
 
for this soft body
that barely fits
 
in her palm. Its head
rolling side to side,
 
neck broke, eyes still wet
and black as seed.
 
Her sister, now at her side,
wears a dress too thin
 
for the season,
white as the winter
 
only weeks away.
She wants me to help,
 
wants a miracle.
Whatever I say now
 
I know weighs more
than the late fall’s
 
layered sky,
the jeweled leaves
 
of the maple and elm.
I know, too,
 
it is the darkest days
I’ve learned to praise —
 
the calendar packages up time,
the days shrink and fold away
 
until the new season.
We clothe, burn,
 
then bury our dead.
I know this;
 
they do not.
So we cover the bird,
 
story its flight,
imagine his beak
 
singing.
They pick the song
 
and sing it
over and over again.
 

With every stroke of her pencil  

the little girl unfurls dreams

and traces childhood’s uncertain roadmaps. 

A twisted loom,

lines on a page mending sorrows

which she weaves into life’s purity.

In a scarring script

she tattoos the wavering future

on the bare skinned wall.