the car coming toward us veers and Kira cries
out and braces against the sweep of headlights
as the car nears and straightens and skids
then straightens and in a spit of snow
comes to rest on the shoulder, quiet,
undamaged, ticking. I’m as nervous as Kira
though I try not to show it as she sighs
back into her seat.
After Michael died, Mark went to rehab
and Danny lost his hair and disappeared
each weekend into the High Sierra,
and Brian worked his torso into a perfect board, a stacked
abdomen
and a thick grid of veins raised beneath his forearms
when he flexed.
After Michael died, we stood in a basement
and drank soda out of plastic cups and watched a montage
of him becoming young again.
We reach the peak of the bridge
and Kira leans to the window to watch the bricked ice
glide by below, and what I remember is
we flew a kite, Michael and I, a grey November Saturday,
he knelt in a field and pulled it from its box,
shimmied the rods into the slits,
the cloth growing taut across the frame.
He threw me the spool and jogged out
and shouted, Now! freeing the kite while I reeled in the
string to make it climb.
And it did, it lifted, he whooped and stumbled toward me,
he took the spool from my hands and zigzagged out
across the darkening field, his eyes skyward, his tongue
curled
from the corner of his mouth, Michael, Gordo, chubby
in his Little League tee, undone buttons, his chest
a soft shelf of flesh, the flabby puds of his nipples
pressing through his shirt, eyes tight in concentration.
And time passed, it grew cold, I slipped my hands
into my sleeves, a dog barked, I called, Michael, Michael, he
shrugged
and chinned the air, Look at it! It made a ragged snap,
it seemed proud, what color was it? It hung there like a wish,
I said,
Michael, pleading, I wanted to go home.
I tell none of this to Kira as the wipers rise and fall
against the snow.
How could I explain it? My friends
working their bodies into youth
as they grow older, Michael tethered to a kite
while I called his name,
the snowy road, night falling.
And how can I explain that when she puffs her bottom lip
and blows her bangs from her eyes
there is so much love inside me
I want to pull the car to the shoulder
and hold her there, while all I can do
is nod at the shoreline
and say, When it’s warm, we’ll come back here.
And I think that maybe we will—a weekend in a cabin,
a stone path sloping down to water, the river
in front of her, her hands shading her forehead—
and she just turns the heat up and smiles, and I accelerate
down the last drop of the bridge,
and our stomachs jump into our throats, and we coast
back into the country where we were born.
Sunday Morning
The weather turned bad and I got happy.
That’s wrong—I mean the morning sky
was ash blue, birds on the ground. I mean
not happy but good, not good
but fastened, steady, like every train in the city
was running late, but no one minded.
On 12th Street, tarpaulin swelled
and bowed in wind. Rain drove straight
through a woman’s dress. And again
on Hollis, that slowness: damp black
trees, the line of streetlights
paced like breath. I pulled over. Leaves
dripped like rinsed hands.
A girl held her mother
by the shoulders on a porch.
Far Rockaway
Not this one
says the woman on the platform
this one
is going to Lefferts
you want the next one
the one to Far Rockaway
and I nod
though
