The morning walk
along our stretch
of shore suspended,
my daughter, alight
with curiosity,
holds the hard husk
out to me in her palm.
Obsidian black
and desiccated,
flecked with sand,
the skate egg case is open
at one end, a nascent tear:
a modest aperture to briny,
underwater amplitudes.

I explain that somewhere
out in the Atlantic—today
tinged cerulean blue and green—
a skate is swimming.
Its diamond shape
soars in subaquatic space,
wings through water like a kite.
And from its body
the color of sand
an invisible thread
unspools for miles,
rising eventually
out of the waves,
enchanted fishing line
into my daughter’s hand.

Hank Williams was hymning
“I Saw the Light” that night
when after dispatched glasses
of small-batch bourbon
and increasingly tall tales
of sorrow, heartache, and woe

Uncle Rick removed his right eye
and handed it to me unsolicited,
an alabaster marble in his palm,
the iris cobalt blue—coral icing
around a hearse-black funeral pie.

After a lifetime of wondering,
my fingers brushed his hand
and I knew he saw me plain.

Do you see me?

I’ve been devouring poetry,
by the line,
by the page,
by the book.
No poem has been overlooked.

I’ve been feasting
on free verse,
blank verse,
perverse
cascades
of stanzas and rhymes,
a banquet of words
on which to dine.

I’ve been swallowing ad nauseam,
scarfing down similes,
masticating metaphors,
gormandizing poems aplenty.

Rhyming couplets,
I’ve contained them.
Sonnets and epics,
ingested.
Lyrical odes,
digested.
A thousand lines
to make you swoon.
I’ve tasted them all—
the potent and
the picayune.
Villanelles, check.
Sestinas too.
I even hiccupped
my own haiku:

          Icicles melt on glazed gutters.
          Water drips, prolific, bits of sunlit seeds
          promising lilacs below the eaves.

Do you see me*?

I hate to ask, but I’m afraid
something poetic has happened.

my head is a tureen
brimming with stars
my arms are utensils
in a darkened drawer
my chest, a room of last resort
my feet are stressed, in short

Such prosody is blinding.

Can you tell me why
my eyes are bleak?
Or why I no longer
blink?

I sense the sear of fluent tears
composing on my cheek:
endless drops, black beads,
consumptive stains of ink.

We counted seventeen that morning,
driving in circles around Greenbelt Park.
Biding time before preschool drop-off,
we moved in measured paces beneath
a verdant canopy of oak and Virginia pine,
crossing diminutive rivulets repeatedly,
revisiting the same downed tree limbs
and tired park signs, disappearing and
reappearing in mist, our languorous
revolutions seemingly interminable,
each lap lost behind our slipstream.

It was a game we played together,
my daughter and I, circumnavigating
that slight road and counting the deer.
We tallied the bucks, does, and fawns
in plain sight, either ignorant or bold.
Vigilant, we watched for minuscule
movements beyond the windshield,
subtle stirrings in the understory:
a foreleg caught in a confusion of ferns;
a white tail, brazen, above the blueberries
or hovering, a clump of cotton atop holly;
caramel eyes cupped in mountain laurel—
ephemeral proof, woodland intimations.

Most days, we saw nothing
but familiar creatures as we
circled, spinning our wheels.
If we parked on the shoulder,
the black ribbon of bitumen
seemed to move beneath us still,
a vinyl track playing under tires,
daughter and I locked in place—
two diamonds at the tip of a needle,
skipping across prosaic grooves.

But the morning of the seventeen!
The moon hung dilatory in the sky,
a winking crescent eye, opaline.
And with each loop, the number grew.

-------------------------------------

Two years later, I circle back,
my daughter and I walking
toward a black fishing pier,
gulls etching invisible lines
into an aquamarine sky.

I ask her if she remembers
those rides before preschool,
if she remembers the morning
we saw those seventeen deer.
We pause, waves washing
white sea foam over our feet.  
She looks beyond the breakers,
taking in the horizon’s hard line,
a crisp indigo seam that appears
to stitch the round world straight.
One hand rests on her bony hip;
the other grips a shell-filled pail.
She turns, sizing me up with the
cold skepticism of a six year old,
and shakes her head in disbelief.
She tells me I’ve got it all wrong:
It couldn’t have been that many.

I’m tempted to argue. Instead,
I ask her, why does that number
(seventeen!) seem too high.

She looks at me, incredulous.
What am I trying to prove?
She speaks in small measures,
makes herself perfectly clear:

We were driving
in circles, Daddy,
and the deer,
the deer,
they move.

At once the horizon bends,
azure arc in space and time;
gulls stall in midair, snapshots
above suspended breakers. Silence.
Suddenly I’m back in Greenbelt Park,
treading nimbly, veiled by ivy screens,
leaping broken dogwoods cantilevered
over precious shallow streams,
muscles, ears, and eyes electrified.
I see as the unseen eighteenth deer
would have seen us—two creatures
harnessed in a restless death machine,
recumbent gods marking territory.

Around again. Wait.
Another close orbit.
Scrutinize red taillights
fading to distance and
then explode, vaulting
across alien asphalt,
hard halo of misery:
unnumbered,
exalted,
infinite.

When I was 17,
the wreckage
of my home
smoldering
a hundred miles east
of my degenerate
disposition,
I worked
the carnival,
bathed in iridescent light,
kicking the crap
out of time with
my alligator boots,
spinning carousel stories,
exhaling cigarette smoke
in circles above the perfumed
heads of carnal housewives,
the calliope music
swirling endlessly,
a loop of depot kisses
and whiskey lust,
my leather gloves
softened by torn
ticket stubs and
legerdemain.

Beneath big top canvas,
the lonesome doves
of my past tangled
with boxcar bandits
and funhouse shades.

I set the clowns aflame.

On taught ropes
of reckoning,
I tilt-a-whirled
toward evening’s
inexorable blade.

Picture my younger brother,
age nine, supine, sprawled
on the kitchen counter after
that aluminum baseball bat
cracked the top of his head,
while our mother, former ER nurse,
sutured the wound with black thread,
my sister and I pinning his arms
and legs down ******* the Formica
to keep him from writhing away.

I saw my brother yesterday,
now bigger and taller than me,
hair thinning faster than mine,
and upon catching sight of the
white crescent scar, remembered
my mother’s steady hand,
red with blood, stitching skin to skin,
sewing together two moments in time.

I

She’s sleepwalking again,
my nine-year-old daughter,
who shares the bedroom
with her sister down the hall.
She’s kicked off the covers
and wandered downstairs,
somnambulant, her bare feet
moving as though in a dream
across the kitchen’s linoleum
floor to the back of the house.
The porch door smacks shut—
a gunshot—and she is gone.

For a time, I watch her from
the open bedroom window.
Her diaphanous nightgown
absorbs August moonlight.
She steps slowly, a pale flame
floating across the back field,
the wiregrass up to her knees,
avoiding a copse of redbuds,
skirting shrubs and stones.

When her small figure succumbs
to shadow at the edge of the trees,
I put on my bathrobe and follow.

II

At first, she is lost to me.
I break into a delirious run,
scratched on my cheek
by a redbud branch.
Reaching the tree line,
I see her standing still,
shoulders stooped,
a luminous cattail
bending down.

She hovers above a sleeping fawn,
the warm bundle curled at her feet.
I contemplate the white spots
scattered on fur, thinking, velvet stars.

But when I place a hand
on my daughter’s shoulder
I see blood flowing fresh
from the doe’s abdomen;
red entrails slipping out,
pooling on pine needles.
Stepping closer, I remember a moment
earlier that evening: a jar of preserves
spilled carelessly on the kitchen’s stone counter,
the soft dishtowel soaking scarlet in my hand.

At the edge of the creek, a second doe
watches us with opaque, joyless eyes.
My daughter puts her finger to her lips;
the doe tenses, blinks, and bolts away.

I lift my daughter and carry her carefully
home, her head buried in my shoulder,
blades of grass clinging to my bare feet.

III

My daughters' room:
holding her in weak arms, poised
to lay her on top bedcovers,
I notice her sister’s empty bed,
neatly made, the blankets smooth
and tight across the mattress.

An anemic moth bangs
against the window pane.

The light flicks on and suddenly
I am awake, remembering all of it:
the dry diagnosis, the slow whir
of hospital machines, the smell
of old flowers, and somewhere
in my daughter’s stomach,
the cruel mathematics
of cells metastasizing.

My wife stands in the doorway,
her hand on the light switch.
My arms are empty. I gaze
down and see our daughter
nestled under covers,
breathing softly, asleep.

I see the pale white skin of my clean bare feet.

You’re sleepwalking again, my wife says.
She touches my unsullied cheek, hooks her
fingers through mine, and shuffles me down
the hall to bed. Head sinking into the pillow,
I gaze out the open bedroom window and weep.

The moonless sky cradles its constellations:
bright grains of salt scattered on soapstone;
my hand trembles, unable to wipe them away.