In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud
rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.

I can't see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,

including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child's feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.

I imagined her
stretched out and weeping
over her womb on a stretcher,
shaking. scared. steadily,
whispering her wants to her wished
as the ambulance whisked
through the dark of morning.

The son had not come yet.

When I arrived
my sister lay, covered in blues,
body bound to the hospital bed,
belly big with life still living.
water, just about to burst,
she beckoned my hand.
I stood beside a gripping moment,
hard to grasp. her

pushing while pulling,
my nephew’s heartbeat
like surround sound
bouncing through all the silence
on our tongues. some bodies, stood
still like statues—hard to feel.
once his heart stopped, it was cold.
and lifeless.

my nephew was born.
after dying. in the maternity ward
at St. John’s hospital. my mother
tucked his itty bitty brown body
tightly into a purple blanket,
placed him gently into my sister’s arms,
and I cried
as if there was no sun in the room.

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late.  This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

Begin in September. The September before
I knew you. Wake up next to the smoky hair
of a woman from whom you want
absolution before she, whoever she is, wakes.

Feel the way summer air dies
like moths in the corners of her house,
the fluttering, gray quell of your heart.

Slip out so quietly she can’t contest
the echo of unlatching or your boots
across varnished floors. Open her front door
into February, the spring before your graduation.

Walk until you find the high red window
of the first girl to break your heart.
Stand beneath it. Think of her dark hair.
Think of the night she came down to you,
made you promise in the dark-wet foxtails
at the end of the street, the ocean air cooling
her mouth as it opened over you,
how the night was a knot she undid
with her slender fingers, then withdrew.

Now, find wish-seeds floating
through the Augusts of your childhood,
tangled in uncombed hair and the sugar-taste
of fried dough. Remember the exhaustion of fireworks,
rain warming on the hoods of cars, thistles hiding
in the long slender bodies of sweet grass,
sandy blankets rubbed with oil,
airplanes writing names in the sky.

And don’t come back to me, Love,
with your kiss full of regret. Return to the home
you built of twine and fallen branches,
to the girls playing hopscotch
near the neighbor’s brambles.

Recall the feel of sap, the rules of hide-and-seek,
the bitter milk of dandelion dared to the tongue.