I think of you, washing my face
I see you in my glass of juice
I hear you, crinkling my newspaper
I think of you, reading some letters

I know you, as I drop down, sinking into the plush couch
I think of you, sitting motionless at my computer
I sense you as I anxiously turn down the heat
I feel you and look through my face reflected in the window

I feel you, tying my shoes and ambling out the door into the open avenue
I think of you and glide past a private garden enclave, dotted with plastic cherubs
I hear you as my beaten sneakers tap and skip up the steps to the store, two at a time
I think of you as I take in the bookshelves draped in rows and rows of secondhand novels

I smell you, mixed with the warm brown scent of coffee; a mild, nervous moment of lavender, the hearty wood of café tables
I see you, quietly seated near the window, two hands on your coffee, shoulders slightly hunched, smiling softly, brightened by the noon sunlight
I feel you, two hands hugging your shoulders, your downy sweatshirt, smart little hands, your perfect cheek that I kiss, those lips
I know you, careful and happy, passing me a pear, looking down with a new, small smile and showing me your reading: love poems, giving a fleeting laugh, calling yourself a sap, romantic and I drink in every instance of you, ecstatic

I hear you in the shake of bells as I open the door to leave and watch you through the window
I feel you, your fingertips lightly drumming a goodbye against the reflective glass
I recognize you in the red glow of street-market mangoes, arrayed in wooden baskets
I think of you and wait patiently to cross the street

I see you in a graceful, dated streetlight
I think of you, rolling back my cotton sleeves
I feel you in the sunlight touching my neck
I think of you, and see an old man resting on a green bench

I feel you, gripping my door handle
I taste you in a square of chocolate
I see you in my tall, clean glass
I think of you, and turn on my reading light

I took a rose out of our neighbor’s garden;
A pretty thing to take your thoughts on past
The pain.  You shift in bed, reveal your scars:
Red sickles in your skin.  I’d hoped you’d laugh.

Outside, our own rose bush lays bare, the new
Rose petals torn and stamped into the dirt—
The thorns, stained red with drying blood, jut through
The tangled, shattered stems and upturned roots.

But I’m confused; you start to talk about
Your mother.  “My own birth,” you cried, “was such
A mess! And now I have this child…” Get out,
Go to the garden, where snapped branches crunch—
I think of when we smashed the rose bush, thrilled;
How I emerged unscathed as your cuts spilled.

A little longer,
And time will be stronger,

Drafting a world where no such road will run
From you to me
—Philip Larkin


There I sat
Alone with my pie
With its perfect golden crust
And its sugary dust.

The metal fork I
Used rang clear
When it clicked against the plate
Cutting smallish bites.

It’s then that I
Think of my mother—
She taught me how to cook
This pie from a second-rate book.

I was six
When we had to move;
It was best, I was told, to leave what I knew behind
And I didn’t mind.

Everything was new
We had a very small house
Then I started again at school
Oh, the kids were cruel!

And there was nothing
Like our loneliness
I thought to my mother
Too quiet to tell her I loved her.

I hid in my chair
She found the book
“We’ll make a sour cherry pie”
And pulled a glass for whiskey.

We cooked for hours
Cutting cherries and folding crust
Neither of us was concerned
When we saw the pie had burned.

We didn’t care
About the charred
Black welts and the rock-like crust
With its burnt carbon dust—

My mother and I
Were happy, we knew
the fruit and syrup survived
hot and sour, baked inside.

It’s 30…
it’s 28 degrees outside,
or so says the rust-cased thermometer
on the balcony.

The blizzard we’ve been expecting all week
is a churning grey mist in the distance—
it is easy to see from the balcony
if I look through pine boughs.

The woods expanding below our mountainside balcony
are also home to several swanky condos;
evergreens and birch all down the mountain,
and a dusty snow falling in the valley below.

We are all familiar with the reddened barn
staring at us, perfectly opposite our balcony,
commanding a small field
on the little mountain across the dip of the valley.

But the blizzard is swallowing the neighbor mountain
in its snowy march towards the balcony.
And the lazy, drifting flakes above the pines
are shook into a frenzied dance.

A group of skiers, lost and floundering in the white
near the buildings lodged in the woods below
understand that cold, chaotic feeling I know
as the valley blurs in whitewash.

‘D’you see that?
Right over there?
Tough to see in the young grass.’

‘No, what do you see?’

‘I see
one muscular snake,
nosing cowpies by the post.
cold little *******.’

‘Well, should I shoot him?’

‘Might as well, I suppose…
Don’t shoot the po-’
Bang—.

There are too many nights in a lifetime—
hours spent sleeping through the story
between birth and death.

The images are simple:
an empty highway, blue under midnight;
the huddled peaks of spruce that line the background.

Now and then, headlights ghost past.
I have time to reflect
in the interim silence in the car with my family.

Nearly all of them
are fast asleep.  There are too many nights in a lifetime—
so many moments of calm that I forget.

Years of life full with nights roll by, headlights shining;
there’s peace in
the steady beam of headlights, streaming through the dark.

Sparse snowflakes fall through the path of light
which leads a car
around a curve in the road before us.

The wind and silence on the road and in the car
dissolve into my body like a liquor—
I am calm.

The car ahead rounded its turn,
bearing down the highway,
its headlights fell across our windshield—

I forgot the events of my lifetime, and
felt no urge to think.
I flinched with a twitch before the impact.

A tattered bird had a made a tomb
in tepid water, it was a puddle
near the framework of a half-built room—
but the soul’s a swerving tunnel

and the dead are waiting at the end:
all sorts of animals huddled at the fringe
where littered pine needles stand
and creep inside the sandy construction site,

pale in the morning light,
the tractors dug aesthetic swirls in the sand—
a culvert keeps the brook alive,
it flows into the forest, which learns to mend

its scars with the festering of its things:
kingfishers’ **** on the berries and branches,
if the plants could undo their own stink
the heart wouldn’t die on its haunches—

the morning’s dew resolves to hoary ice,
its killing the greenery,
but the sandblasters lean, arranged by the outhouse, like
a dream, the first worker arrives early

he rests against a smooth-planed board—
flood the mind, but be sure to drain it out,
its his breakfast cup of tea that stores
his knowledge of beauty

past the place where the bushes are thin
there is an apple orchard, plucked to pieces at the end of fall—
trees arranged in ranks, held up with wires and strings:
a dementia arboreal—

the smells from the orchard meet
the smells from the machines and hover
above the building-zone, mixing with the bite
of cold humidity—a cruel kind of vapor