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Eclipse

A girl, no, a young woman, lazily walks into the surf,
relaxed as the long afternoon, walks directly toward me—
sun setting behind her in a cloudless pale pink and orange sky
over Galveston fields, weeds, debris, surviving palm trees,
the abandoned, stair-less bathhouse and miles of soft, almost
powdery pale gray sand—she walks away from the landscape
that briefly held her, through the water, eclipsing
the sun, her body in complete silhouette, and I know
that I know the black construction paper stranger
who I emerge out of warm waves into breeze for, know
the new shape of her, for I have watched that form blooming
for thirteen years, have studied the newborn’s dance
in my arms, the girl’s gait as she trots and gallops in the yard, runs
for the school bus in flip flops, walks away from the house,
fingers in shallow jean pockets; I walk toward the woman
she is becoming, everything
and nothing like the girl
she is now—
a grown woman approaches me
until her path veers, just a little in my direction
and light floods the silhouette of her, erases
the woman, reveals the astonishing complexity of angle,
joint, dimension, motion, texture and color of long-waisted curves, solid muscled legs, bony shoulders, loose hair
and too-heavily lined brown eyes
arriving just to say Hi.

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this recent revision was submitted for publication (hd)

Persistence

White paint splattered across a canvas
of high grass, clusters of daisies
glow at dusk, their infinite bright faces
like galaxies of fat stars
punctuated by buttercups—
pools of semicolons and ellipses.

The field’s flowers become light spilled
and scattered amongst impenetrable layers
and shades of green—bushes and trees climbing
the hill behind a yellow house, gathering
strength in late May beneath a Technicolor
Magritte evening sky. Under the front porch light,

on the stoop’s stage, a moth drags heavy,
cream-colored wings of tissue
striped with the palest pink
along a notebook’s edge, oblivious
to the poem being written around it.
In spite of it. Suddenly about it. Claws

along the horizontal ladder of metal
spiral and all three edges of thin paper
then follows the faint blue tracks
of black script. Climbs onto the pen
that is writing it. Traces
the pen’s length then paces. Declines

to the poem again, circles a stanza
before abandoning the poem
altogether and settling on the copper
beer mug, orange body folding
beneath draping wings like a miniature aircraft
parked without fanfare.

The world does not ask us to write it
or paint it. We persist, century
after century, asking pigment
and syllable to bring us closer
to the world’s body, like a lover
longing to describe the beloved.

We work the oil to remember
how the field sways, seducing
us to enter. We unwind the line
to catch the moth that is already gone.

Her Words

Silent, the girl holds a pale blue cigar box.
She stands in thick dusk, both hands holding
the closed coffin at heart level, ready,
offering it to the ground. It has been lightly raining
on and off for days. Early May, layers of yellow-green
lighten the quick, darkening air.
That small body was still soft when she found him,
pliable when she gently folded him into a torn, white t-shirt—
the innocent out of pain.
This ground does not resist the shovel.
Yet, digging still takes longer
than I want it to take, for the longer we wait
the more we’ll remember.
She hands me the box
covered with her words
written with marker. I should
bend down, offer
the dead to damp earth
but I hesitate, trying to read my daughter’s words.
While her body has bloomed overnight,
her voice has grown rare, painfully
rare. Too dark, I struggle to decipher
the shapes her fingers worked
to form, feeling like I’m reading
someone else’s love
letter. My gaze lingers too long on her writing,
as if I could read my daughter’s heart—this lovely stranger
I raised, this child, this woman who has become,
is becoming, was—the minute she was born, is—the moment,
in the moment, a force that cannot be contained yet must
be, even as she longs for what she hates.
The box’s blue cardboard
lifts her letters away from its surface, makes
them hover, luminescent. After one line
I stop reading. Suddenly, what matters
is that she wrote
across the entire face of the box. Her hand
kept moving. She said it.
Her words glowing in my hands,
I stoop and give them
to the grave. The sound
of dirt hitting
a coffin of any kind
sounds the same.
As my right arm embraces her,
she leans into me.

On Sweetheart Mountain

for V.

Raw garnet in the rock beneath our feet,
we stand separate yet together—wordless,
witness to the vast valley, aching snow and silence.
Rare, stunning silence.
The kind that reminds us we’re bone clothed
in flesh, small creatures given breath.
Specks on top of a mountain, balancing on a ledge.
A bird calls out. We do not know what bird it is.
Then a Black-capped Chickadee stirs the air—
its small, plucking call leaves
an absence of sound so penetrating
and complete we can only whisper.

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submitted for publication (lyl)

music that has never ended

Here is the Last Stop variety store
where you worked your first job unpacking boxes.
Here is the beach where you juggled rocks
and chipped your front tooth. Overlooking bright water,
the yellow house your family loved and had to sell.
The sandy lovers’ lane where you first tasted salt
from a woman’s skin with the windows wide,
open. Eight years of stories that you told as we drove
tangled roads in your black Jetta, kayaks on the roof.
As we walked every beach on Cape Ann,
paddled the pulsing harbor and bays,
married on a rock overlooking the raw sea.
But this turbulent force, this blue that is not blue
nor green but sliding, rolling, slipping over itself endlessly
in its rush toward rock and sand, these cascading
layers of sound—the roar, the whisper, the crashing—music
that has never ended, that has existed since the beginning
of time—this is no longer your story.
Or ours. Or mine. I stand
at the edge of the surf,
cold wind sobering my vision,
staring into this rare sea, loving this face of God—knowing
this may be the last
I see of her—as if for the first time.

Witness

You are the shard of light
flashing from a spoon’s hollow—
and like everything infinite
I cannot touch the softness
below your ear ever again.
Why, my own face
reminds me of yours,
for in these eyes
even strangers see
all that I became
in loving you. All
that I believed, witnessed, lost
and learned over eight centuries.
Even my child can see longing and defeat
playing against the iris’ defiant fire.

Naming Jack

There is nowhere I can go
that you are not present.
The hairpin turn that took us
away then returned us home.
The overlook where you placed silver
in my daughter’s palm so she could see
April’s gray bowl of valley.
The very museum window
through which we looked out upon rushing
brown water, red brick from another century
and hills that leave only a thin strip of sky.
This is the cost of living in a small place.
I came here to escape my life
without you, forgetting
that everywhere we’ve ever been
will always be ours. When we last
climbed that winding mountain road—side
by side—we were busy choosing
a name for the puppy we’d soon have.
Like expectant parents, we were too full
imagining a future to realize
the moment we were living
could be all we’d have left
once we drove into that cloud.