^{In 1964, Maggie Wilkinson gave birth to a baby girl at St. Mary’s Home for Unwed Mothers in Auckland. Against her will, her daughter was immediately taken and given to a married couple to adopt. In her 2016 petition urging the New Zealand government to conduct an inquiry into the decades-long practice of forced adoption, she points out that the history section of the Anglican Trust for Women and Children’s website does not mention St. Mary’s Home for Unwed Mothers. She asks: “Do they believe by erasing it from their history that it will go away? That the evil will fade?"}

The history remembers twelve cows on average
were milked, and that an Old Boy sent the secretary
a postcard from the Holy City. Maggie Wilkinson
was told her records were lost in a fire—or a flood.
She was force-fed drops (ergometrine)? . . . bound and given a drug to stop
lactation, stilbestoerol??? The history includes the names of many
bishops and buildings, and the cost per annum of running things.
Yet there is no space for the matron’s soft shoes, her habit of
silently appearing behind Maggie and screaming if her mop strokes were not square.
No room for the Bible on which the mothers were made to swear
never to try to find their children. Look at the rain tonight
in Auckland, how insistently it searches, in hard spirals,
down Queen Street toward the sea. Winter has just begun.
Soon, the moon will infuse the clouds with a color that has
no name—shy of silver, shy of violet. Homes of Compassion,
some were called. St. Vincent’s. St. Mary’s. One girl,
in the weeks after giving birth, eased her ache by carrying
the family cat in her arms as one would a baby.

_{Italicized language is drawn from supporting articles and letters included in the petition: Petition 2014/80. Inquiry into Misuse of the Adoption Act.}

^{an erasure from the history section of the Anglican Trust for Women and Children’s website}

a      constant danger—

people who desire

                                 exceptional experience

in     controlling     girls

                                            nature and scope of work

and        milk

In your uncle’s workshop by Havana Bay,
Your pudgy hands, stubby fingers turning
Lithe with wood, cloth, springs, bone, coir,
Your life a reverence to sawdust and burl
As you labored each day in the heat and the light,
Standing on a plank jacked up by bricks,
A ring of tools cuffed to your small wrist,
Your palms and soles callused to stone
As you fluted gadroons, flounced damask,
Beat down unruly tacks to martial rivets.
                                                        O padre mío,
I learned to craft words watching you sew
With the finest thread and not leave a trace—
To be patient, steadfast, reverent in my work.
Don’t dawdle, don’t waste, you’d say, but save
What you can’t use today for another day:
A scrap of cloth, a stray idea, an orphan verse.
gazed in wonder as you made the bucksaw
Sway like a violin’s bow against strident wood,
How you ironed wrinkled linen to vellum,
Or straightened the crookedest of nails
Because anything can be fixed. Praise you,
Papá, my poet of hammer, needle, and shears.

There were lemons growing old in a clay bowl,
A dozen injured pots that wobbled on the stove,
White countertops with stains like continents

Mamá hid with doilies and patches of an old stole.
A small cabinet stowed vials and jars, her trove
Of ground spices, dry herbs, heirloom condiments

To enchant croquettes, hors d’oeuvres, fillets of sole
Biscay style. With rasp, spoon, and pestle, she strove
To please Papá who scorned those recherché scents

Of haute cuisine, so she fricasseed oxtail in a soul-
Ful red sauce, boiled ham hocks, cooked tripe with cloves
Of garlic—simple, brawny, no buttery ornaments

To rouse his anger; but on Sundays she’d cajole
Papá with sautés, gratins, and soufflés that drove
Him to beg for seconds, thirds, his taste buds in ferment.

There’s Baxter, our neighbor’s harmless little dog,
before a storm door window, contented as a cat.
We’re in a row house and share a front area. One day
this summer we were headed out just as our neighbor
and his pet were coming back from a pee jaunt. Much barking
before our neighbor calmly said,
“Let them live, Baxter.”

And there’s our maple, now in winter
stark as any other tree, when only months ago
it tried to dominate the block with color
and, as far as I’m concerned, succeeded.

Now let’s bring in snow
there on limbs and branches, speaking up
as streetlights come on. Does that do
the trick? The idea is for the poem
to be as good as a pot- au- feu, where, to my taste,
after all those cuts of meat, plus marrow bones,
plus vegetables pulled from the earth,
the trick is done by cloves.

^{translated by Karen Kovacik} 

Three of us pretend to be priests
during the long break after gym.
In the changing room girls jostle in lines,
flushed from basketball or dodgeball.
They shriek and compete
for who has the most sins.
The chairs become confessionals,
and we kneel before the backrests.
Boys drop in from the locker room next door,
followed by kids from other grades.
The whole school erupts
in a frenzy of false confessions instead
of confessing falsehoods to that stranger
behind the screen in a dark booth.
Our penance: chewing bitter
rowanberries—
a few or a fistful depending
on the seriousness of the sin,
the liveliness of the yarns, pieced together
from adults’ conversations, laughter, the onslaught
of images during drowsy lessons, the fears
when you wake at night and gaze
between buildings up at heaven.

How many such days: sprints on the playground,
the toss of a medicine ball in gym, and, just beyond the wall,
this contest of stories, improvised
or artistically arranged in advance.
Till they caught us. It ended with reproach
from the principal, and the priest thundering,
“You’ll have to confess that confession!”

Spowiedź

Trzy z nas w roli księży.
Długa przerwa po wuefie. Przebieralnia.
Dziewczyny tłoczą się w kolejce, zgrzane
po grze w kosza, w dwa ognie,
przekrzykują się, licytują,
która ma więcej na sumieniu.
Krzesła to konfesjonały.
Klękamy przy oparciu.
Wpadają chłopcy z sąsiedniej przebieralni,
za nimi—dzieciaki z innych klas.
Szał w całej podstawówce. Gorączkowe
zmyślanie wyznań zamiast wyznawania zmyśleń,
kłamstw, win obcemu człowiekowi
za kratą ciemnej budki.
Pokuta: rozgryźć gorzkie
owoce jarzębiny,
kilka, garść, to zależy
jak ciężki grzech,
jak żywe bujdy o występkach, wyklute
z gadania dorosłych, ze śmiechu, z inwazji
obrazów podczas lekcyjnej śpiączki, z lęku,
kiedy budzisz się w nocy i patrzysz
w niebo między blokami.

Ile było takich dni: na boisku sprint,
w sali gimnastycznej rzut piłką lekarską,
a za ścianą wyścig na historie, improwizowane
lub kunsztownie ułożone wcześniej.
Nakryli nas. Skończyło się apelem,
naganą dyrektorki. Ksiądz katecheta grzmiał:
będziecie się spowiadać z tej spowiedzi!

^{translated by Karen Kovacik} 

Let ordinariness in poetry be like the white
plastic chairs by the Wailing Wall.
In them, not in showy armchairs,
the old rabbis pray,
foreheads touching the wall’s stone.
Regular plastic chairs—
women and men climb up on them
to see each other over the partition.
And the mother of a boy celebrating his bar mitzvah
steps onto a chair and showers her son with candies
as he bids childhood good- bye.
Let ordinariness in poetry be like these chairs,
which vanish to make room
for a circle dance on the Sabbath.

Białe krzesła

Codzienność w poezji niech będzie jak białe
plastikowe krzesła pod Ścianą Płaczu.
To na nich, nie w ozdobnych fotelach,
modlą się starzy rabini,
czołami dotykając kamieni w murze.
Zwyczajne plastikowe krzesła—
wspinają się na nie kobiety i mężczyźni,
żeby siebie widzieć ponad dzielącą ich przegrodą.
I matka chłopca, który ma bar micwę,
wchodzi na krzesło i obsypuje cukierkami
syna żegnającego dzieciństwo.
Codzienność w poezji niech będzie jak te krzesła,
które znikają, żeby zrobić miejsce
dla tanecznego kręgu w szabatowy wieczór.

We first met in your home. Outside,
summer fire. Inside, Texas
summer ice, I was wiped out
by travel and illness, lying on a couch,
which made me a good height for you to talk to.
That I had a son with the same name
as you, struck you with wonder—me, too—
one name, one label, two beings. We said,
to each other, I think, whatever came into
our minds—put there by what the other
had just said—as if we threw,
one by one, taking turns, those
intensely dried paper flowers
of my childhood, into a glass of water,
and watched them uncurl, fast, uneven,
and bright—and tossed another. We were in
the present moment, so intensely in it
everything outside it took a step back,
out of the light, then another step back.
And that was where we met, next,
years later, in that light, you were so
intent, alert, alive, as if
in the grip of a fierce brightness, and moving
around in it, quick in its grip. I wish I had
been there, last week, to hear your best friend,
who had met you eye to eye—in what,
in your childhood, was the future—talk of how
extraordinary you were, my almost
unknown dear, your mother’s and father’s
dearest. You were wearing a cape, that first day,
a cloak of many colors, a cloud,
your hand on the shoulder of the wild creature of your life.

I don’t think the task of naming me
fell to my father because they thought
the sex of the child was decided by the sperm—
I don’t think they knew that. They thought that giving
a name was a big deal, so it should be
a man who did it—and my mother was grieving,
her Father in heaven had given her
another daughter. In the room where new parents
pay and check out, they won’t let you take
your baby home if you haven’t named her.
I think there would have been a flourish,
a flash for the nurses in his dark brown eyes,
a delay as he closed his eyes and held his
frat-boy finger above the open
Bible, then brought his digit down into the
creek-bed of eros, the laid-open
lady book, and touched my name.
This morning I wondered if it was on purpose
he opened the book way back in war,
in Kings and Numbers, letting the Psalms
and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes go by,
good-bye to Isaiah and Jeremiah,
and stopped, blind, at the narrow window
of a song—the slot for the crossbow’s arrow
between turret bulges—he touched my name among
the roses and the lilies, I rose up
under my father’s thumb, and his fruit was
sweet to my taste, and the shade of his presence
has been all my life a rich and enduring night.

It’s not her elytra,

glittery and hard,

but the second, delicate pair

of wings they conceal,

folded along artful veins,

that when it’s time

will open and carry her.

Imagine stuffing a planet in your pocket, what you would
find about time or the time you didn’t have a pocket;
also, the vast empty of what we can’t keep in mind

like this morning’s snow, as if it could reflect a sense
of space, lost time, or anything except what’s cobbled
from what happens in fraught moments, like the time

you stole cereal for Emmy from the Benson General Store,
which was also a kind of empty but not what gets
described with equations as space dimensions.

I read a book once that said human history could be told
as a sequence of invented drinks: beer, wine, whiskey, tea,
coffee, and Coke—Coke being the greatest deviation

from nature, but you can’t tell where to draw the line
between natural or what’s made up, like the quark nobody’s
seen with a naked eye or how theft could make sense.

Beer was discovered when barley was left in a vat
catching water, somebody tasting it with that empty-pocket
feeling like a mother in a row of Benson General cereal.

Who can put it all together—the sympathetic, the synthetic,
the analytic, and the peculiar way things evolve in time
and space, the links between drinks, as beer to Coke.

You probably read books, too, and, like me, doubt that
a single morality exists. You know space does, but you’re
not sure where, in the end, it empties, which is what you feel

when you’re off in a winter snow by yourself and you think
you know snow, common as your coat pocket—then it melts
and you realize you’re not sure you know anything at all.

We’re standing in the road
looking at a dead fawn. His truck facing town,
mine headed toward home. It appears to be sleeping
on the double yellow, curled as if in tall grass
or on a down comforter in a video someone has posted
on YouTube about her pet deer. No sign of collision
or gunshot, garroting, heart attack: nothing but spots,
cuteness. The name on his door means he works
on the natural gas pipeline that’ll run
from West Virginia to North Carolina.
The company that pays him has a reputation for ruin
worse than syphilis. Employees have been told
to stay away from locals. They stick to a hotel
near the freeway with a decor I’d call modern roach,
drink there, hone boredom, look at stars.
We both crouch to make sure the fawn is dead.
“What the fuck,” he says, staring at the desert
of my face, where there’s no rain or hope,
only cactus, as I search the dry lake-bed of his.
He looks back at the fawn, brings his hands together
as if waiting for a Communion host,
makes a scooping motion with his hands,
then slides his eyes to the side of the road:
I’m being asked to help save a dead fawn
from the bonus carnage of traffic, the shredding
that suggests life isn’t just delicate
but deserves to be erased.
We are the briefest couple
joined by common cause, move the fawn
and stand briefly as men who have respected loss
for sentimental reasons. Then nod, become ghosts
of a moment we are the custodians of, holders
of the unholdable, wind telling the story of itself
to itself.

           for Andrew Periale

The sparrows in the gutter knew you
And hopped out of your way.
The trash being blown about
By the wind gusting did as well.

A few scenes from your life
Were about to be performed
By a puppet theater in the park,
When it started to rain hard,

Making the great trees panic
Along with mothers and children,
Who ran shrieking for cover
Wherever they could find it,

Except for you, already seated
In a long row of empty chairs,
Waiting for your angry stepfather
To step out from behind a curtain.