of Forest Hills, New York

“Day Two”

Day Two

Sister, you surprised me in the bathroom.
It was just after I'd nearly fallen off the edge
of the world again. For a second, I was shy.
My body was still new. Then I remembered
the gone of your body and nearly fell off the edge
again. You laughed, and I realized, we never
laughed in a bathroom together the way
sisters do, so I laughed back. Can I tell you?
Sometimes you feel so present, like you are
the whole air, and I can't help but laugh as if
death is just some boring guy who hit on you
at a party, so I stole you away to the bathroom,
the way sisters do. Can I tell you? There is
an animal inside me and I can't say whether
it's joy or grief, only that its whole body is hunger,
and I want to feed it, I want it to devour me
until I'm a free coherence of mote and light,
like you, sister. Could I hold you then, if touch
is a thing wherever you are? Or if not touch,
at least feel your voice in my ear, not only
in my head? You make a joke about my head
not being such a terrible place for a voice 
to stay, and I realize then you've walked me
to the kitchen, and I'm chopping strawberries
for my daughter, the way I've done ever since
she was little, even though she rolls her eyes
and tells me I don't need to do that anymore,
and I should probably pay attention so I don't
cut myself, and I ask if it's OK to pay attention but
you're not there again so here comes the edge

of Okemos, Michigan

“Slow News”

Slow News

1.
They expected
slow news.

Letters, when they arrived
at all, came

from the Pacific atolls
of months ago, not the islands

and battles their radios
announced that day.

The return mail, perfumed
or stuffed with photos,

moved slowly along
the shifting front,

sometimes lost at sea,
sometimes arriving behind

death, which traveling fast and light,
knew all the shortcuts.

2.
On the nights
of no news,

slow news nights,
the TV anchors

made stuff up, elevated
the mundane to extraordinary,

the dull to lustrous.
Suddenly, everyone’s opinion

was fascinating, every angle
a feature story, every life

transformed magically
into two minutes of fame.

Odd pets are slow news flashes.
Every kid’s activity a must see.

On these nights of no news,
the anchors, and we with them, long

for the freak storm or act of nature,
the accident on the freeway,

solid scandal or celebrity death.
Did I hear a siren, feel

the earth tremor or
was that just me?

3.
There are memories
which others give you

 which you keep and repeat
and remember as your own.

You pore through old papers
surprised

that you somehow missed
the events of your own life,

your life in global context,
the slow newsreel

where you both starred
and did a cameo.

of Fair Lawn, New Jersey

“Relish”

Relish

                        1

My father loved relish. Roast beef
and pear relish, a little bit of heat.
I’d love to shove him some. Try this,
old man, though I’m older now
than he got to be. Still, I found this stuff
in a deli up North, the kind of place
where they stare at your accent, so
I clip things off, words don’t last,
hard sounds finally win, but there’s
patience in mozzarella that chills
through plastic. He’d like it too, talk
about now, his grandson, the man
in love, the country we never much
discussed. When he ate chuck roast,
I could see it mix with words
and bread crumbs falling on
a sweeping hand, sweeping
off sentences forming and
going away. I think I’ll stay a little,
as Lear says, I think I’ll join him,
I know I will, I’ll pick up something.
It was relish that made me drive
away with his hands waving,
and relish the color of light, and crisp
leaves of money I threw out
the window and the wind saying you
stupid mother fucker and the wind
bringing peppers and gravel flying
up over our heads and vinegar
sunlight spinning and it was us
saying the last things we ever said
to each other onto a fork or spoon of relish.

                        2

But the air contingency is sweet,
the history sour. The rind goes
swimming in the brine, the brackish
shallow current taps the ankle—
where are you, Achilles? Your father
in Hell tries to put his arms around you.
Where are the voices tipped in spice
watching football in a trailer park
playing cards sometimes?
I sit straight up in bed. I can hear them.
I can hear Al Hansen slow roll in a drawl
he has practiced for a thousand years.
That, too, is relish.
And you eat it by yourself in the dark.

                        3

My father played football for an eight-man team
in high school, in Dover, Oklahoma,
where grass seed joined hay seed
and wheat seed and milo
for cattle to look at for long hours
before they chewed it twice.
My father, 145 pounds, but a guard.
Whose tee-shirts rode up to the tip
of his shoulders so that his arms
seemed longer, spider arms.
So they could hold what frightened them.
He delivered mail, before that, studied the ocean,
before that, the earth, core samples. You can see
the oil well out the window. Hung
in one spot. Like a hammer in blankness.
Something not going to happen once again.
You can see time move through earth
to when there was no language,
only compression. But you have to leave out
the hole he makes in the line for the back to go through.

                        4

He puts his elbows out, braces his feet
so nothing can get through. I drove
through terrible rain thinking
about the standing. In the mud
with the defense coming. To keep
them back. And the balance of being
small on the earth. And the silence in rain
with the radio and saxophone and needle
in a groove going round and round and round.
He stood in it. He put his prayers in it.
Rain kept raining in a hole. Flint sparked
against it. A shovel took away the dirt.
Down a hill and some rock steps our neon
fishing line billowed out to an edge
of nothing at all.

                        5

To be taken in by the curve of the neck
of the nuthatch, lesser to greater
as greater is to the whole. Rising, falling
wha-wha-wha. Gray, white breasted.
Black supercilium. Maybe a drunk’s on the porch
weaving, knocking and knocking
and knocking, a volunteer calling
under eaves. No way she lets him in.
Would you? barks the nuthatch.
Wha? That guy’s mean but it’s confusing
because there’s love in spider marks
around the eyes. Buff and rufous feathers.
My mother opens the door in the fifties.
My father has a voice of his own
alternating laughing and crying,
wanting to be let in.
And you would have to be in time,
just wait there
for disambiguation
between trill and call and whistle.
In a house like that a furnace was a grate
you couldn’t step on but dance across
to music you have or don’t know you have.

of West Palm Beach, Florida

“Trompe L'Oeil Triptych at the West Palm Beach Street Art Fair”

Trompe L’Oeil Triptych at the
West Palm Beach Street Art Fair

—French: “fool the eye”

                              -1-

The girl is diving off the edge of a rock quarry,

and your perspective is as if you’re behind her

staring at the teenager, who is wearing a bikini,

blue and white stripes; below is the dark water

at the bottom of the quarry that you both see

although you’re looking at her spine, shoulders,

and extended arms, which are the asphalt street.

When the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooter

massacred seventeen students in Parkland, she—

the girl drawing the girl diving into black water—

was a freshman, she informs us matter-of-factly,

noting his sentencing trial is all over the papers.

The girl adds that mass-shootings occur regularly,

almost every day: her father keeps track nationally.

                                   -2-

A boy across from her is drawing descending stairs

that go deep down into the street—where you see

at the bottom a blackness with some kind of glare

on the surface of it as in a well—black and watery.

The girl says a van crashed the fence by the theater

of her school last week—most seniors had left early

on senior privilege, although some hadn’t, like her—

the driver tried to get into the building but security

stopped him. Her school went into lockdown. Crazy,

she says, one minute you’re at lunch in the cafeteria

and then the next minute you’re texting hysterically,

and teachers are saying be quiet and locking doors—

she says everything is trompe l’oeil, the art of trickery—

as in daylight shutting lights to feel safe: you can see.