Poetry

In bed they reach for each other and draw back.
She knows he can’t or almost can’t, he knows she won’t
or will reluctantly. Afraid. She doesn’t want him
to fail. Or feel he has failed. She wants to tell him
you can’t fail me, not this corrugated body. Never

When Daddy began his long forget,
stashing his checkbook in the potato bin,
Mother tried to teach him new things,
how to dry dishes and shatter them away
while my sister Alice Ann, our tried and crude believer,
maintained we could rebuild Pop’s mind,

Alone in the orchard, among thin trees, summer leaves
sprawling upward,

they found her reaching for a peach, hungry
but unharmed.

Every spring the teachers take down snowflakes
and tape clusters of hand-linked

paper dolls to classroom windows. They call them
families, the crayon-colored bodies,

No one spoke of what killed the doe that lay
in the middle of the open field.

It was the year she found her parents were not
her parents.

Rambo and Rimbaud are living out their golden years
together in a house on the coast
with ropes and buoys decorating the deck.
It is situated along the beachy edge of things
among the tri-colored corrugated shacks
and the Airstreams parked in deer clearings

All the way back
I watch the rain in leaf lock
the streets bent in the wet rock
of autumn—a mote
between your goodbye
and the promise of the hunt

Cold again
I pour hot water
measure tea for the cup.

I leave the lights off
to test how strong
the daylight—
how much more
even rain-grey
we can work by.