When I was your age
the subway cost fifteen cents
gas cost thirty-two cents a gallon
television was free
& so was Saturday confession
in preparation for Sunday communion
when I was your age…

Commuting, standing
in a half-empty
subway car, reading news
on my phone, an article
on two competing
theories of consciousness,
triggers a memory…

I remember being told to soak
myself in unreason—that words
fall to pieces because the wind

needs her role; not everything
must be a weight to grunt over.

Once we followed the others on all fours,
contributing trails through grass and brush
to favorite trees and watering holes
before our spines thrust us up on two feet…

I want to meet
night as a friend
who welcomes and comforts
offers solace and replenishment.
I want night to
become a place
I seek
to deliver, to surrender, to belong.

Last night the new moon broke open across my shoulders.
Then dawn came through the trees
in pinpoints of varying sizes
like starlight glowing among the leaves.

A sea wife,
my mother didn’t have time
to pace a widow’s walk,
searching for a sail on the horizon.

She was too busy
pinning up sheets to dry,
weeding the garden…

Two restless houseflies
buzz around my living room,
stirring the August heat on this
dog day of a summer afternoon

They land for a moment, then
take off again

My love and I drive south
For seven minutes of darkness.
During solar eclipse, the sun proposes,
A sparkling rim and white-hot stone,
We drive for margaritas, the blue Pacific,
to make love when Orion rises…

Here they come, on they go,
One by one, in a row,
misanthropic phantoms
Drifting by me on the street…
snuffed candelabrums….
No warmth to meet…
Incense del Dia de Muertos

As children we mocked
The earthworm’s ambitious move
From safety assured

As children we laughed
At their madness
Their vulnerable bodies
Called by the drumming

A hawk rises on a prairie thermal,
its diminishing black shadow below,
its eye wed in magic to a single spot.

I step in to feel promptly like the prey,
wobbly with hypnosis by gazing above
me, a disfavored adversary to a predator.

In summer months
sun and moon rise from the same spot,
a point northeast of my porch, the place I welcome morning.

I drank Merlot last night from the wine glass you gave me
and thought about how we’d met when our children were
chubby angels, marriage still appeared the answer and the
Twin Towers still raised up above Manhattan like trusted sentinels.

moose at the forest edge
cross the meadow in the sun
munching browse little trees
head up sniffing on the breeze
easy easy ecotone easy
filament barnacle billabong
troubadour trouble away…

People of Thebes! who walk in the debris
Left by the Seven[1] and mourn
The Dragon who lies in the dust,
His teeth chipped, murmuring
About mothers and sons.

We have no heat left for showers
and the washing up. The instructions
to relight the pilot are detailed,

patient—but leave us no warmer.
Grease hangs on our pans.
How quickly we dry ourselves…

Every Memorial Day, the lines of this poem interrupt my thoughts, popping in at odd moments as I watch my children jump in a pool or take a bite of a burger. In eighth grade, I had to memorize a poem from a photocopied packet of famous poems as part of an English assignment. In my fuzzy memory, I am sitting at our kitchen table while my mom makes dinner.

The first gathering of the Stalwarts was, of necessity, an intimate one. It had been far too long since the social business of politics had occurred under the supervision of Kate Chase. Mary Todd Lincoln being of a sour disposition, and unattractive besides, the great Washington salon of the war years had not been the White House, but the Chase residence.

The country east of Roseville is a gentle plain of grassland and houses, tilting steadily upwards toward the Sierra Nevada. It’s a gradual climb that an automobile wouldn’t notice, but the eastbound freight labored at it, all six power units throwing thick black smoke into the afternoon sky.
In their boxcar Lynden and The Duke stood like sailors on a rolling deck — hands clasped at their backs, feet wide apart, faces thrust forward into the wind.

The northern lights have a sound, you know. Like static but grander. The electricity of eels, not machines. The first time I’d heard their song, I had just arrived at the upper reaches of Finland’s Bothnian Bay, and while standing there at the edge of the sea with the lights shimmying and quavering above me, for a moment, finally, I wasn’t staring at my feet, the pavement, or the cracks in the earth. I was actually watching, truly listening.

Beyond the thatched eaves of the school building, the Moie River shimmered in the hazy midday sun, its green oxbows carving through steep lush mountains. From afar the refugee camp’s rows of bamboo huts, nestled among palm and banana trees, looked like a tropical paradise. Up close, the terraces were barren hard-pack dirt, the weathered shelters so close together neighbors could climb onto one another’s porches.

Erin goes to Coney Island. The year is 1952.
Long before the bus makes the familiar turn towards the shore, she can smell Sheepshead Bay. The saltwater, combined with steam clams and the scent of cotton candy, makes her nauseous. As they approach Coney Island, Erin looks out the window and watches the people walking along the boardwalk. The August heat hangs like a weight over the day, making everyone move in slow motion like they are stuck in wet cement.

“I don’t believe in God.”
That’s the first thing Jack Reed says in class. Not surprising really, Mickey Powell thinks. Most years there is someone, more often a guy than a girl, who wants to define the terms of engagement on the first day, to get the battle, so to speak, onto ground he felt safe on. And what do kids know about God, anyway? What does anyone know?