memorial service was short.”
All summer I listen
for clouds cracking open with you,
your brief alphabet of grief swooping in
from the skies with the late-morning mail.
There is room here to land
in the ordinary,
a clearing for what is missing.
I’m waiting to hear from Madrid,
from Tokyo and Madagascar,
where loss, I’ve read, flies fastest
in the smallest of words.
Homecoming
And maybe when you arrive—
stumbling up the cracked path
thick with hopscotch chalk and weeds—
a stranger will answer the door,
insist you’re no longer on Elm,
that this is not your home.
Autumn will well up, swell in the gutters
you cleaned every year since twelve,
spill into the color of a landscape
you can’t see but feel,
bricks untwining, ivy crumbling,
smoke unbraiding from clouds.
Maybe then you will turn
away from the echo of a knock
back into your own life,
away from my picket-fence memory,
framed still in this dilapidated doorway,
wondering who you are.
Housed
The day we were to look for houses,
wide with porches and promised sun, houses creaking
with our middle-age bones in rockers; with shutters
stretched open to your upcoming cries and staccato coos;
houses brimming with your grins and girly muses
singing nursery-land tunes in our sleep, our sleep,
that day you, a backwards burglar in my body’s house, broke out
in black water, too soon, too soon,
sounded the alarm till Emergency came running
to cuff you off to breath and barred hospital cribs.
But first you had to live and wouldn’t cooperate.
The authorities took you in hand, called in the helicopters
to whir you over uneven rows of un-owned homes
which we, the expectant buyers, didn’t see,
didn’t see, because in your rebellious escape
and capture into our lives, you were born,
were born, robber of our once-empty dwellings,
thief of our well-housed affections.
Treat
Shadows bloom and wilt across the patio,
our new home sheds flakes of bright paint,
and, of course, it is October; the neighbors we don’t know
hang pumpkin lights like lamb’s blood over the threshold,
and from their porch rocking chairs stare at us, the strangers.
We disguise ourselves with smiles and wave.
And why not? Let the leaves fall and the grass grow high,
our new life floats around us in the frost-free air,
and we own the chaos of autumn; the weeds
would grow between our toes if we’d linger
into another two seasons. We are giddy enough
for a picket fence or a pink flamingo
and bring out Baby to see the splendor.
“Here,” we say like good parents, “is the color red
and over there, the irrepressible orange of joy.”
Sixteen-inch Black-and-white
square — portal
of space — to Space,
that grainy, — last frontier
now front — and center,
armchair — and moon
close — companions.
Beyond camera and crew; beyond Houston; beyond
airwaves that ride high outside our knowledge; beyond
Mrs. Stouffer’s mashed potatoes, every mother, father,
sister, brother huddled about a set, those grounded
rabbit ears tuning us into a future beyond that edge-
of-our-seats shot filmed ’round the world; beyond all
that—we’re there, each of us, two-stepping between
craters, bouncing into wild blue possibility far beyond
1969 and our three-channel, living-room imagination,
desperately dreaming of soaring beyond what we
already know of beyond.
Local News from Someplace Else
It’s still sci-fi,
this slim disk catching sky in its curve,
luring invisible signals.
Unsightly
