A Partial List of Truths
With a singular love, with a lump of guilt & closing the door where she wanders without direction. The stairwell with its strangers who press each morning a tender word to the ears of their animals. Promises like June & with them the share of any lake, what’s given for the carrot, the white bone, the apple to its core. With birds & sticks & their merciful distractions. She wakes now & leaves behind the stillness of the floor, no longer needing to answer when the children call, no more nearness to those few, essential words, nor the painless nothing that was.
Knocking Twice On Wood
It was nearing the end of winter & we held each other at the narrow edge of the elevated platform. I’d published a few poems & she, she was painting & working on a novel. I was no good at making the move, hardly competent in asking her to dinner. The rising light catching here & there the dirt & grime on the cabinets, the oven door &, now that that life has closed, I’m hardly the hero of the story or, if so, my shirt turned around & inside out. These wilds—a grasshopper on the lip of the wide-mouthed jar—come as far as the screen leading out to the porch, to the citizens of my alley, to the almost lovers carving their names in a tree. Alone, there still rattles the train, taking us that first time to my small apartment where she drew a bath & afterwards, in our mutual haste, we flung every pillow & sheet right to the floor.
Before We Ever Lived
Back in the extraordinary dark, my wife & daughter sleep, the boy’s neck makes a dreadful angle into one of the soft pillows on the pullout couch. Outside, inhabiting for a moment this land called Pennsylvania, I hold my hand to the chest-high hedgerow & where the beach rose used to live. Queen Anne’s lace dappling the hill before the dull white flowers give way to a second, unyielding hill of planted flags. The grasses grow new, clean stones while no one looks & I’d like relief from the storms that hammer our eastward hurry to a crawl. Although we know the moon travels ahead without us, it’s easier to believe we will not fall alone when our bodies return their glimmer to the stars.
