You told me the son of Acton’ s town nurse
would never cross the border
into Concord, where the Revolution
left great houses standing on Main Street.
Yet we crossed into Concord, walking
through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
to greet Thoreau, his stone
stamped with the word Henry
jutting like a gray thumbnail
She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact:
there’ s only so much you can do with friction
and an intentional hand before the hand burns.
The sound that scissors make in a child’ s hand
while crunching construction paper aches when
she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style,
that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk.
Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that.
We come down from bunk beds. We come down from
the funky reds and yellows of the spring’ s summer tanager
In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There’ s a Rembrandt glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
As soon as possible, I will confront the wren’ s
doings, rinse the white streaks from the porch bricks
drawing lizards from their shade, the immediate
smell of water too much for all of us.
But first is lunch. The remains we’ ll scatter over
the driveway away from the bricks. Wrens come,
crusts from our dishes make drama. Then history.
Whenever my father was left with nothing to do —
waiting for someone to 'get ready',
or facing the gap between graduate seminars
and dull after-suppers in his study
grading papers or writing a review —
he played the piano.
Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee,
With promise of strength and manhood full and fair!
Though cold and stark and bare,
The bloom and the charm of life doth awhile remain on thee.
Thy mother’ s treasure wert thou; — alas! no longer
To visit her heart with wondrous joy; to be
Thy father’ s pride; — ah, he
Must gather his faith together, and his strength make stronger.
Some species can crack pavement with their shoots
to get their share of sun some species lay
a purple froth of eggs and leave it there
to sprinkle tidepools with tadpole confetti
some species though you stomp them in the carpet
have already stashed away the families
that will inherit every floor at midnight
But others don’ t go forth and multiply
as boldly male and female peeling the bamboo
their keepers watching in despair or those
endangered species numbered individually
I came awake in kindergarten,
under the letter K chalked neat
on a field-green placard leaned
on the blackboard's top edge. They'd cagedme
in a metal desk — the dull word writ
to show K's sound. But K meant kick and kill
John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal
was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard,
he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave
unseen with Phil’ s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it
into the mounded deeps of the city dump.
Simply, there were things that Phil didn’ t want
to hurt his family with. Do you have yours?
We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge
of a trembling nation when it went down.
Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.
It was coming.
We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their
long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen.
