My mother’s second cousin
went to a fine university,
majored in anthropology,
and wore Italian wingtips
and a black fedora pulled
down rakishly over one eye.

I hear he was a handsome man.

He joined Toastmasters
and spoke extemporaneously
to small crowds of strangers.

He packed a leatherette
bag and went bowling
every other Sunday night.

He took his children camping
and taught them to catch a fire
with magnesium and tinder.

He mowed the lawn
with lapidary precision;
neighbors admired
his yard: brilliant green,
sharp as an emerald.

He played the spinet piano
in the hallway after dinner,
the metronome clicking out time.

His black suits—
immaculate skins
of a domesticated
creature—smelled
of cigarette smoke
and fountain pen ink.

But, according to my mother,
something went wrong along the way.
He began to hunger for something that clawed
just beyond the evenly trimmed hedgerows.

He smiled at night, listening
to malevolent creatures leaping
from rooftop to rooftop.

He began to hate his wife’s
brown dresses: brown is
the color of compromise,
he seethed to himself.

His voice became quieter;
bowling became a bother.

Eventually,
he left his fedora hanging
on the coat rack in the hall.
His neglected wingtips gathered
dust in the bedroom closet.
The pockets of his favorite suits
swelled with cryptic notes, written
to himself with stolen fountain pens.

One night, when the children were sleeping,
he set the table and killed his wife with a spoon.

I hear he was a handsome man.

Feet propped against porch railing,
I breathe in autumn's mounting chill.
Beyond the porch, the giant sycamore
catches afternoon sun on bone white bark.
Yellow leaves drop, amputated
hands scratching air as they fall.
Limbs sway, inscribing grief in the wind.

Standing up straight, I grab
the shotgun and stride past
mute chrysanthemums toward
the woods to meet the dying light.

I had to learn what the word
contiguous meant when I was 26.
We hit all 48 states in nine months,
driving the Ford Ranger in a figure-eight
from East Coast to West and across the Plains.
We stopped midway to work in Salt Lake City.
She bused tables at Little America. I did landscaping.
At night, bodies squeezed together in the bed of the pickup,
America expanded around us, a sweet smell of syrup and gasoline.

I

*******, the blues
were running, the scrum
of seagulls a white cloud
of chaos above the waves.
The water churned and chopped,
teeming with small fish
devoured by bigger fish
ravished by the sharp-toothed bluefish—
all of them darting frenzied toward shore.

And my father screaming
for someone to, quick,
grab the fishing poles
for God’s sake.

My little sister
in her yellow
bathing suit
would not wait
for the poles.
She yanked fish after fish
from the boiling surf
with her small hands,
screaming in delight and victory.
She ran up and down
the beach, between
colorful umbrellas,
pausing only to toss
another writhing body
onto hot sand:
a wild child flinging
silver-scaled sacrifices
to stoic, multicolored gods.

We ate smoked bluefish for weeks.

II

Remember sitting in our first apartment
watching the snow beyond the windows,
listening to records and drinking seven-dollar
bottles of Malbec from juice glasses on the futon,
the narrow hallway strung with Christmas lights
illuminating thrift store paint-by-numbers?
Billie Holiday was singing “Lady Sings the Blues,”
her voice like a lady’s shoe, worn-in, refined.

I remember pondering the present
I would give you a few days later
in Ashtabula on Christmas Eve,
neatly wrapped and hidden under
the bungalow’s sagging eaves
(more vinyl, a Coltrane/Hartman reissue).
The snow would be falling in Ohio too;
your grandparent’s house filled with the smell
of Scottish shortbread and the sound of daytime TV.
When your grandfather died a few years later,
we listened to Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again”
at the service—your grandmother crying in black.

But what I remember most about that night
was later in bed, the snow subsiding,
the radiators clanking with warmth,
the Christmas lights casting colors on the wall,
your finger tracing songs across my back:
the stylus gliding to center, making me spin.

III

300 milligrams of Wellbutrin,
orange pills arranged in my palm
like hallucinatory ellipses, swallowed
to see where the last sentence will lead.
A bleak prescription: pain has a syntax;
grief, a simple grammar.
A land of blue shadows. An ocean of glass.

But that was years ago now, thank God.
I wrote poetry like crazy then,
on a word processor with a screen
the size of a paperback novel.

I smoked. Skipped class. Slept 17 hours at a time.
I scoured the dictionary for recondite words,
turning sesquipedalian over and over
in my mind, each syllable a sedative.
Like Rilke’s panther, I paced in cramped circles
around a paralyzed center, my winter boots
tracking mud along the brightly lit corridor
that led to the psychologist’s office.

One night I crashed
at my aunt and uncle’s
place in the foothills
and woke up alone with
a sense that the room, the house, maybe
the whole **** world was shuddering,
coming unmoored.
I retrieved my uncle’s .357 magnum
and tiptoed from room to room brandishing
an unloaded firearm in my boxer shorts.
The only sound, diffuse in the darkness,
was the gurgle of the fish tank filter.
I cocked the hammer, watching lionfish
swim in vibrant, agitated circles.
Next morning, I read the newspaper
and chuckled, having never felt
an earthquake before.

With a shock, I think back
to the Thanksgiving break
when I flew home from college
for the first time: the vertiginous
sensation of floating thousands of feet
above the Wasatch range, the mountains’
blue shadows and blinding snow
disorienting, my heart an unspun
compass incapable of pointing true.
The plane’s engines roared in ascent.

Decades later, I’ve landed:
married, with three children,
we drive across the country
in our minivan with the moonroof open,
howling out Tom Waits songs in unison.
Our moments together are conjoined
like tender marks of punctuation—
commas, semicolons, colons:
when the wind washes over us,
it whispers
and, and, and, and, and....

You sink in despair
but will soon float because of
the fear you displace.

The barn door swings open
with a heave of rusted chain,
padlock clanking on timber.

Step inside the barn
and the air is cooler.
Dust motes hang
in shafts of light.
High above you, witness tobacco sticks
tucked into the crossbeams like bones.

The tractor is dead.
But there is a baby doll
propped against the wall.
She has wisps of desiccated hair
and straight bangs that hang
over an empty eye socket.
Her bland face is spidered with cracks.
The ragged hole in her chest—
such an indelicate wound—
reveals a wire skeleton.
Her right hand, missing three fingers,
cannot smooth the tatters of her dress.
Her naked feet are ***** but
undiminished and intact.
She smiles, almost.

The doll watches you watching her.
A wasp lands on her one good eye.

You step toward her through slants of light,
dust settling on your shoulders and shoes.
The metal roof temporarily catches
the shadows of planes and birds and clouds.
As mice scurry beneath canvas drop cloths,
the barn door closes slowly behind you,
pushed by an unexpected breeze.

Many summers ago
you were married in this barn;
it rose up like a cathedral around you—
white candles and the smell of fresh straw,
relatives warm in their folding chairs,
a man playing acoustic guitar, golden rings.

The old baby you see is new,
detritus gathered alongside
dull hacksaws, scraps of lumber,
the mechanics of broken things.

It is time to turn around now.
It is time to walk into the meadow,
wearing your most beautiful dress.
It is time to notice the sun high in the sky,
to feel your heartache cooled as you buzz
between the shadows of tall flowers.

I am no artist, but
were I to sketch
the hydrangea dying
on the dining room table,
I would want to capture
how the room just brightened,
sunlight filling the windows,
illuminating the flowers
as they move without
moving even closer
to a final decomposing.