Whenever I speak, I feel as though
I’m on stage or on the witness stand.

My testimony has someone’s life
hanging off every word.

Each syllable is like an in breath taken just above
the wave’s crest before going down again.
Speaking in order to save a life, my own life.
I must convince the jury that I’m
a credible witness to life’s incidental happenings.

This happened—
Yes…
This way, and at that time—
Yes…
In that order—
Yes…
With those results—
Yes.

For a very brief time, A. & E were like
a diphthong, sitting side by side on the
bench outside the meditation center,
meeting secretly at odd times and places:
7:13pm in front of the library;
2:32pm on the cliff overlooking the Pacific.

A. wrote poems for E. and sent them on
kitschy postcards. E. was introduced to A.’s
son; A. met E.’s former spouse.

For a very brief time their pulses synchronized.
The rest of the world retreated like a
chorus line moving upstage, letting the
two of them stand alone in the floodlights.

Then, one night, alone on a street corner,
they got so close that each of them disappeared,
vanished like binary stars in a death spiral.

E. was frightened by this, and so they agreed to unhook
their limbs, letting the gravitational vortex fling them
to opposite ends of the story. No longer singular,
but plural once again—each.

Bow. Bow to it all: the loss, the deluge, dams broken,
lives buried in beds of mud, square miles of charred forest,
all those for whom those forests were home.

Bow down to the loss, let it fill you. Their loss, your own loss,
each loss emptying the world of its having been. The ever-flowing
waters carving out new routes from higher ground to the depths.

Nothing is lost, only changed, reborn as a new sapling here
by the edge of the receding water line.
From ashen forests floors oaks sprout.

The loss of loved ones filling multiple hearts with compassion.
Where there was the touch of a hand memory serves up
sublime moments. Sitting, talking quietly on a brownstone stoop.

You remember her last words. She was in her wheelchair and it was time for you to leave and as you said goodbye you asked: “Is there anything else I can do for you before I go.” And she turned to you with that deadpan expression of hers and said: “Yes, take me with you.” And you laughed, hugged her, and left her there with her husband and cousin – her dear cousin who called you the next night and said: “Susan died today.”

You sob, then later that night you begin remembering the
sublime moments with her, each one filling you up again
as you honor her request and bring her home with you.

What is this? It feels vaguely familiar.
Is this Solomon's "Noonday Demon"
establishing residence again?
Melancholy? The dejection
of a scolded child?

I am carrying my sadder twin
with me wherever I go.
My shadow has finally caught
up with me after a long while.
Like an unloved cousin, it has
tailed me all day long.

Coming close enough to murmur
in my ear. What it is saying is
unintelligible—whispered sibilant half tones.
The lamentations of dying mollusks
stranded along the sunbaked shoreline.
The grieving call of an un-mothered fawn.

What can be done? Is there anything that
should be done? Are we in danger here?
Is it possible we could drown together?
The two of us bound as one like
Paolo and Francesca in Dante's underworld.

Me, making the motions of trying to live a life;
it doing the only thing it knows how to do—
clutch my shirtsleeve and groan in tune
with the cicada’s last few bootless
serenades to the empty woods.

She takes the young boy’s hand,
hurt by the wagon pull, and holds
it in her own. The day is hot, muggy,
a typical western Pennsylvania summer.

She comforts him. Wipes away the sweat
and tears, looks at his hand, recognizes
the wound, and then his eyes, so much like
her own.

A dizzying feeling arises, the way one feels
when standing on the edge of a subway platform
and looking up, the first butterflies-in-the-gut
when coming on to a hallucinogen.  

Tripping once in the Santa Cruz Mountains, he
was convinced that he’d died, was killed by a
hit-and-run driver and his body lay lifeless on the
side of the road in Brookdale. She nearly died
in Felton 30 years later.

That night, he’d noticed the way the light of
a street lamp turns redwood trees into
giant, false replicas of themselves.

She hears a dog moaning in the apartment
below hers. He is startled when his cabin door
bangs open and the ******* retriever stands
there wagging his tail. No one knows who his
owner is.

The black retriever would sleep in his 65 VW
bug if he left his windows open at night. She owns
a 2000 VW and as far as she knows no one has
ever slept in it.

In Brookdale one summer evening there is the
sound of couples arguing, the crash of broken
China. He comes out of the cabin, a woman follows
behind and body-slams him into the pyracantha
bush. He lays in the pyracantha laughing as she drives
off in his car. He looks up and sees an older woman
smiling at him. She reaches down, takes his hand,
and pulls him free.

The lobelia is dying. Its tiny bluish-purple
blossoms curling inward as though they are
giving up, the stems slack, lifeless. It seems
depressed.

She would ask if there is anything
she could do—but it’s a plant—and she doesn’t
speak the language of plants.

She bends down, takes the lax stems in her
hand and holds them the way she holds the hand
of the elderly woman she cares for when they
have run out of words left to share.

She’s new to this. She has not been fully
responsible for another living thing in many years.

There was once her dogs that she finally had to
surrender that time when she was in California
and wasn’t sure whether she was going to admit
herself into a psychiatric hospital or take a last walk
half-way across the San Lorenzo Bridge.

And there were her sons, whom she left behind on
two occasions because she was going mad in
Massachusetts. When the pressure had grown
too great and her resources too thin, she fled to
California to get away from it all—and both times
discovered she’d brought all her problems with her.

The last time was her Road to Damascus. She
found the dharma at a local meditation center and
brought it back with her. Minus a few difficult hurdles,
she has been equanimous ever since.

She looks at this once resplendent lobelia drooping over
the side of the planter on her deck next to the pansies, so full
of themselves, and the indifferent alyssum, and she wonders
if she can help it live. Or—if not—can she help it die?

She slapped me hard across the face
She said: “You’re not stupid”
I was only 9 years old
But I knew she meant to say something else

She said: “You’re not stupid”
I couldn’t understand her
But I knew she meant to say something else
She seemed to hate me after Dad died

I couldn’t understand her
So we grew apart
What else could I do? She seemed to hate me
And I mirrored her hatred

We grew apart
Because she would beat me
And I mirrored her hatred—
Wished she’d been the one to die

She beat me
When I was only 9 years old
And I would mirror her hatred
After she slapped me hard across the face