That silver dawn bears no weight, its last wooly leaves are fire coral sunk to the bottom of the branch worn bare. Night coming early bears no weight—at five p.m. the day shuts closed like a clam’s stony mouth. My daughter calls for me, and I begin to weave the narrative of motherhood: the matted wool woven around our ankles, an ancient’s net tied to the bed for an oyster’s life span. This is not only metaphor. My daughter calls for me from her bed, her voice an unworn splinter, an …
Stonewash sky, distressed denim gulf, each palm tree sensuously distinct as the organs of lovers, this bulge, that angle, I admire each one as if I could commit the entire grove to memory. Over the dunes, waxy myrtle crackles with songbird, yellow goldfinch resting after a thousand miles. A heron startles. I’m tired after a mile of carrying this child on sand. No shade among these pines and palms. Tornado warnings, gulls far away. I lean into the salted wet curls of my last baby and heave my …
A pipe bursts and the floor buckles, wedging her office door half-shut; because I am small and can weave the gap, my mother sends me to retrieve her records. I read each name aloud and, when she says yes, pass her a blue folder. We run through the alphabet, stumbling twice on the deceased, more frequently on the misfiled. I must decipher handwritten names, then forget them as we go. You can do this with sounds— let them float along—if no story is attached; you learn not to know or …
I pull the clipboard off the dash. On the work order, in blue ballpoint, is: One room, no stairs. A 20-minute job I’ll pad to an hour. I back the van out of the shop and turn up the radio — Dr. Laura is on a commercial break. When she comes back, she takes a call from a man who complains that his 19-year-old son runs around with friends and won’t get a job or go to college. Males have a harder time growing into men than girls have growing into women, Dr. Laura says. She tells a story …
Henry’s diary was a soiled jubilation of a recluse’s childhood, stuffed under his iguana’s terrarium, reeking of fierce terror and hands-on scrutiny of grade school intimacy and psychopathy, page by flourished page, inflamed bedlam of erect body odors as purposeful and gusty as the sticky names recorded and blacklisted in backwash gray marker mapping who slithered under-soaped flesh out of station wagons into over-sparkled classrooms cloned with crappy kid’s art and Mom bumper stickers flush …
An ocean runs in reverse into the eyes of those who wept it. in the sound of their restless flow, mockingbirds ask us, speaking the language of loss, what worth it was trading life for shadows, cinder— why we let thousands die then, hold a séance as if we have no shame, no guilt asking for rain from those whose teeth have become ploughshares. Our fathers planted trees, but we fell them to park our self- drive cars— trees whose leaves were letters of appeal delivered, but always unread, …