Transmogrified
by winter squalls,
the branches of the sycamore
have ossified into a cathedral
of snow.

A red cardinal alights
there—a spot of blood,
a feathered clot of sin.

Hush. Listen to the limbs
where he has perched:

the nascent cracking
of winter’s church.

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....

(after Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening)

The light is everything;
it makes a godly sound

spilling through
the locust grove,

washing over
uncut grass,

negating
shadows,

baptizing husband
and wife in oblivion.

Melancholy blinks
like the black eye
of a whippoorwill.

Who catches the
notes of its song?

Only the dog.

Dusk, patient
as a chrysalis.

They can’t hear
the transmutation
yet, but they will.

when the cold comes
when blinking hurts
when the wind chisels
through storm windows
and cleaves the rafters
when your breath cracks
when the ground is too
hard to dig another grave

it’s time

to grab your bag of tools
picks and saws and chippers

it’s time

to find yourself
a canyon of ice

to carve yourself
a bitter monument

The work began with cedar, ash, and pine.
In cold months, the architecture rose
on Utah timber, the truest I could find.
Eventually, come spring, the windows shone.

The house stands abandoned now. In time,
the clapboard, screens, and porch decomposed
to a bleak mark—a wreck on the tree line.
So ruination brings the builder home.

The red metal box is packed with tools:
galvanized nails for the bedroom I dreamed in,
a trowel for the plaster my fists passed through,
a needle and thread for the curtains’ revision.

Open the unlocked door. At once a throng
of starlings scatters, bursts from the roof in song.

Two days
from now
you won’t remember
how I laid you down
delirious,
my six-year-old
daughter
swooning

spoonfuls
of purple
medicine
sickly sweet

your body burning
up beneath
pink sheets
you kicked
to the foot
of the bed

I swear
you were
dreaming
of mermaids
saddled on pink dolphins
like bejeweled rodeo stars
mermaids
swimming closer
mermaids
with long yellow hair
bucking waves—
sea girls with
one hand raised
in salty air,
orbiting
in circles
overhead,
wee galaxies
of ocean mist,
droplets
of sweat
on your lips.

At dawn
your fever
broke with
the sweetness
of candy glass
mason jars;
fireflies
escaping
as embers,
a dimming
delirium
of stars.

Two days
from now
you won’t remember
how I came to you
in the middle
of the night
when you cried
out for me,
your voice
unfamiliar—
a song sung
by a small girl
burning up
beneath
the sea.

Stalled in afternoon traffic
by the crack of a jackhammer
and the smell of hot asphalt,
what else is there to do but wait
for the sun-kissed woman
in muddy work boots and
orange vest to acknowledge me.

She has a tattoo of an AR-15
on her left forearm and more
ink (an octopus?) under her eye.

She is in total control.

Her unclasped safety
vest ***** in the wind.
The smoke from her
Marlboro Red snakes
down the line of cars
and wafts into my open
window with a smell
so strong she should
be riding shotgun.

She alone will deliver me.

As the jackhammer
fires on full auto,
I wait like a child
for my turn to go.

Her eyes squint and the octopus
squirms and my afternoon restarts
with another twist of her gloved hand,
the sign revolving from Stop to Slow.

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.

The farmhouse
also awakens,
pine floorboards
and joists unsettled,
plaster walls rattled
by midnight voices.

In certain rooms,
the lace curtains
sift moonlight
with graceful fingers.

Shadows making their rounds
slink past doors and bedposts,
curl into unlocked keyholes,
uncoil time across the duvet.

Just outside, familiar silver trees
conduct an orchestra of illusions:
branches graze the metal roof,
tap tap tap on windowpanes.

It goes this way for hours,
sounds of a haunted choir.

When sleep comes
my dreams are like
balloons brushing
against razor wire.

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.

At last the autumn
wind has stripped
the branches bare.
Even insubordinate
trees now stretch

their naked limbs
along a leaf of sky;

timber ledger lines
compose a staff
where birds rest
as quarter notes,
the nested chimes
of winter’s song.

You and I unlace
our leather boots.

We wait for snow,
white and absolute,
to change the score,
to blanket measured
roots, a silent chorus.

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.

The woods begin where the backyard ends.
When my brother and I go to the woods,
we are not brothers anymore. We are kings.

Or explorers. Or astronauts. Or spies.

In the woods, we are anything we want to be.
In the woods, we forget about school.
We forget about homework.
We forget about time.

The path through the woods is narrow.
We walk single-file between the trees and brambles.
Later, we’ll pull the leaves from our hair and compare
the scratches on our arms, the places where are clothes have torn.

If we walk deeper into the woods,
across the train tracks, and turn around,
we can see the roof of our house above the treetops.

Below the train tracks, a shallow creek waits.
The rocks are tan and smooth; they skip across
the water like insects.
Mud comes in many forms; we know them all.

The weather in the woods is not like weather
anywhere else. When it rains in the woods,
we hear the drops falling before we feel them.
In the woods, sunshine is a treasure that dissolves in our hands.
Snow is a white map.

If you go with us into the woods, you have to be quiet.
You have to watch out for wolves.
And bandits.
And quicksand.

Sometimes it feels like we could stay in the woods forever.
Sometimes we race through the trees with our eyes half-closed,
daring the woods to contain us. And sometimes we hide
in the woods for hours, waiting for what we know will come:
the clang of a bell being rung from the back porch:
the sound of our mother calling us home.

Without taking
his eyes off the girl
in the handmade dress
he rolls Drum tobacco
into a tight cigarette
and exhales
just as the final
school bell rings

leans against
the hood of a
dolphin blue
Ford Galaxie,
body angled
45 degrees
like a rifle
propped
against
a tree,

smoke encircles
his slick-backed
hair then eases
into autumn air

and me slumped
in the passenger
seat watching him
watching her glide
across the lot
into a future
aside
from anything
we can imagine,

a string of
midnights
blindingly lit
by the Galaxie’s
vertically stacked
dual headlights,

my body
vibrating
involuntarily
along with the thrum
of the most important
V8 engine in the world.

What am I supposed to tell
the children when they bring
their deformed beasts to me?

I teach them the word menagerie as
they clear the project table and sweep
up cuttings from the kitchen floor.

We gather without you for another
slow parade of meticulously made
animals, and I’m embarrassed to
mistake their swans for butterflies.

The sky aligns edge to edge,
a yellow sheet of cellophane,
the afternoon cut and creased
and folded like fractal creature:
a crane inside
a crane inside
a crane.

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.

My grandfather was not a boxer
but he loved to fight, throwing
punches at the faces of hard men,
left and right hooks, uppercuts
in barroom brawls and alleyways,
with hands the size of iron trivets,
forearms cut with ropes of muscle.

Eventually, after decades of stitches
and bruised knuckles, after his hair
turned white and his eyes clouded,
he would shadowbox in the garden
behind the dilapidated potting shed,
swinging slower, less light on his feet,
but safe in that manicured square
ringed by boxwoods and evergreens,
the bees in spring buzzing applause.

My grandmother would watch
him from the kitchen window,
in a sweater she always wore
regardless of the weather,
and wonder what he was fighting
against, or, perhaps, fighting for.

And that’s how my grandfather died:
throwing a final right cross in the air
before dropping to his knees at last,
knocked out on a mat of green grass,
washed by an unexpected downpour,
water collecting in opened red tulips,
loving cups in full bloom, the first
ten drops of rain counting him out.

Standing in that garden decades later,
I know I am no fighter.
Approaching old age, hands in pockets,
I watch for signs of unexpected weather,
worry about things beyond my control:
car crashes, cancer, electromagnetic pulses,
the minutiae of a thousand apocalypses.

Is the future drawing back
a left hook I will never see
coming? Will a haymaker
hit me like a hammer,
unmaking my family
before the final bell?

And suddenly I realize:
maybe I should have
learned to throw
a ******* punch.

She left on a winter afternoon,
leaving her cup of chamomile

tea cooling on the kitchen table.
A cough of car exhaust and she

was gone.

She left behind only certain things:

a thin procession of dresses
hung in the bedroom closet,

a strand of costume pearls
curled in an unworn shoe,

a tube of coral lipstick abandoned
on the bureau beside her hairbrush.

Today the crocuses began to bloom.
I can bear the things she left behind,

but the warble of the robin’s song
is the sound of love as it unwinds.

Laugh if you want;
lately my dreams
are all the same:

black and white and silent,
a montage of mute scenes
in which he quietly appears,

a funny little man beset
by brute absurdities, framed
by a toothbrush mustache,

bowler hat, and vagabond suit—
dressed for hapless caricature,
a disheveled angel in disguise.

He forever waddles away from me
down a lane of denuded trees,
jauntily twirling his bamboo cane,

his gray pocket watch stopped—
a cheap prop at the end of a chain.
Watch how the last scene transpires:

I stay in my cushioned seat
expecting house lights to rise.
Alone in the dead theater,

I wait for the live orchestra
to offer an accompaniment,
to set the silver screen on fire.

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.

Swift nick,
red comma
on my fingertip
gives me pause.

A seagull screeches overhead.
The wind plucks its white feathers,
one by one, scattering them
to the sea like a soft shipwreck,
until all that remains of the seagull
are its eyes:
black marbles thumbed
across a starless sky.

Confining myself to laconic musings,
peregrinations of a decimated lexicon.

Walk with me around the farm.
We’ll catalog auto parts beaten
into rust by weather and time
and gather enigmatic animal
bones eaten clean by beetles.

Together we’ll scout
out grandfather’s land,
meandering until dusk
between tobacco barns
and wasted creek beds,
compelled by atavistic
dread to stick together.

Come, amble with me.
Peer into raccoon dens
and abandoned wells.

Hold my hand
and we’ll send
our worries
whistling
into every hollow,
following
the old paths
of discarded
shotgun shells.

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.

When it is done
you will be dead
so let me tell you
what comes next:

The executioner,
a connoisseur of
wine and dread,
returns to his hole
behind the gallows
and uncorks a bottle
of Châteauneuf-du-Pape,
forgetting all about
his heavy black hood,
which he removes
with a hollow laugh
and leaves hanging
by the unlocked door.

He drinks the bottle down
until all that remains
is a another red stain
on the wooden table,
a circle interlocking
other circles—
Venn diagrams
with nothing
but nothing
in common.

Come morning
he’ll cut your body
loose and listen
to your future:
the sound of wind
threading an
empty noose.

I

Battered by a brute
Nor’easter, the cottage
rocks in rough wind,
teeters on tall stilts,
architecture animated
by howling provocations
until even the somnolent
wine glasses begin to sway;
suspended and racked in rows
below kitchen cabinets,
crystal clinks on crystal,
clear bells signaling alarm—
the storm forewarned is upon us.

II

This seaside aerie rises
high above sand dunes,
undulating driftwalls
feathered with sea oats.
Protected by weathered
shingles and salt-pocked
windows never shuttered,
the house stands sentry,
stoic structure overlooking
the Graveyard of the Atlantic,
the vast saltwater cemetery
where untold ships and sailors
have come to wreck and ruin,
subverted by shifting sandbars
and chancy wayward currents.

Buried in navigational Neverland,
vessels slumber in oceanic silence
on a seabed as soft as coffin plush.
***** convene in chambers of ruin,
scuttling over rotted mainsail masts;
the jellyfish hover, ghostlike, in hulls
above steerage skeletons bedecked
in crenulated shells and sea anemones.
Plankton settles on shipwreck rust:
pervasive spores, mausoleum dust.
And draped across each wreck,
a pelagic pall of melancholy.  

III

On summer nights, children
chase ghost *****, freezing
them with flashlights, scooping
them into buckets brimming
with a berserk racket of claws
and shells scratching circular
walls of makeshift plastic crypts.
From the top deck, we follow
disembodied beams of light
zigzagging in darkness,
graveyard robbers darting
above holes in the sand,
black portals, each one
the size of a child’s fist.

IV

Years ago, so-called
wreckers would hang
lanterns from horses’
necks and lead the beasts
up and down the beach,
yellow beacons signaling
as though from distant ships
buoyed on placid waters.
The lights lured desperate
vessels inland, unsuspecting
captains and crews crashing
ashore in blind catastrophe.
At daybreak, islanders
scavenged the spoils
of their subterfuge—
silver chalices,
jeweled goblets,
golden cups and bowls—
treasures cast to rapacious
hands upon an indifferent tide.
And of course the corpses came,
caught between shore and sea,
rolling in breakers, stuck
in salty purgatory, churning,
shell-pocked and unsanctified.

V

Tonight a yellow mote of light
floats miles from shore, some ship
flickering like a votive stowed
upon a headstone’s crown.

And the half-drunk bottle
of pinot noir in the ship’s
decanter has me thinking:
When my time comes round,
wait for a moonless night,
black funeral gown
of sky embroidered  
with stars and satellites,
and sneak to the end
of the Avon fishing pier
and release the ashes
from whatever vessel
you’ve decided best
accommodates me.
Scatter finite confetti
to an infinite tomb,
ashes dissolving
unceremoniously
in saltwater,
subsumed.

Next morning,
perhaps catch sight
of a spirited sailboat
tacking over waves,
sails billowing in wind
like the unfurled wings
of a sea bird, full of grace,
alighting from grave to grave to grave.

My brother’s in the army;
my sister’s in Detroit.
Momma lost the lottery;
Daddy’s in the joint.

The abattoir is empty;
the kitchen smells like steak.
The cows are off in dreamland,
but the butcher is awake.

The dogs are in the garbage
snapping over bones.
The garden is a sinkhole
choking on its stones.

The furniture’s on fire;
my heart’s a trampoline.
Once a week I wash the floor
with blood and gasoline.

There’s liquor in the freezer
and a hatchet in the shed.
I always clean my fingernails
but forget to make the bed.

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.

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.

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.

You hold my hand
like a cartographer;
latitude and longitude,
coordinates of our life,
discrete geographies
mapped together—
discrete geographies,
coordinates of our life,
latitude and longitude:
like a cartographer
you hold my hand.

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.

Eating breakfast this morning,
cereal in hand, ready to pour,
I was amazed by what I saw:
a blue sky in my cereal bowl.

Put the cereal down, the sky seemed to say.
So I did.
I sat completely still and watched.
I reflected.
The sky, cupped by curved sides
of white porcelain, was very blue
and flat—a lake of blue milk.

All morning, my heart sounded
like a coin dropped into a well.
And me, waiting. Waiting
for the clink to tell me
my time had come.

Eventually, I picked up the spoon and ate.
This is what infinity tastes like.