“Throughout the jiggling trip, stopping and starting, grumbling motor, people getting on and off, trees and ocean whizzing by, I ignore it all to administer the silent treatment to Nick. He’s acting like he doesn’t notice the thousand cuts from my icy glares, but he’ll find out I’m not playing. Today I’m returning Nick to his parents.”
“there was much
steepling of hands
as if the surgeons
were trying to build
a church to house
their inoperable religion”
“Anna to the left
and Anna to the right,
wild mice,
two halves of an apple.
Now it is time to make a wish:
May this be our last visit here.”
“I have the same disease my family does.
I try to tell stories to make things right.
I keep trying to tell our stories right
because I want to understand our past.”
“Poetry never saved anyone from death, though it might have helped a few to go on living.”
“It’s almost September again.
I sit stiffening in the wide
wicker chair, watching
my line break while late summer folds
the garden like a spent libretto, edges
shredded to a slatternly fringe.”
“Fleshy apples cave as winter arrives early
one October afternoon.
Even the cranes gorging
their hard corn in the fields
seem bewildered.”
“It all starts, Margaret will see later, with the old voicemail that plays through her earbuds on the train to work one morning in the first September Cara is gone. In that moment Cara begins to be resurrected, meticulously pruned, like a bonsai. I have some exciting news, she says, not really Cara but only the captured sound waves that are all that’s left of her by then. I need to tell you about it. And I want to hear what’s up with you. Okay, love you. Call me.”
“My father’s ashes
sit on a bookcase,
waiting for a promised trip
to San Francisco,
where he spent the
best years
of his life.”
“There are worse fates.
At least we didn’t end up
as some nacreous gimcrack souvenir:
‘Greetings From San Fran’ in mother-of-pearl.”
“I read this collection shortly after the sudden death of one of my best friends. I picked it up, even though I didn’t feel any spark for art. I started reading in the bath. Then I was on the bathroom floor, water cold, a little shocked to return to myself in human form, holding a book.”
“If I could just get one thing done
If I could set the to do list on fire
If I could create a clearing
I might hear the Japanese maple outside the window
whispering in stillness and light”
“We leave in a respected line
wearing red:
We’ve been sent good weather,
orange fish that flip over beneath the bridge,
a building of rust-colored brick that you exit as if from your body.
You can’t have everything.
No one has everything.”
Rare is the child, or adult for that matter, who doesn’t wonder what it would be like to lose a sense. I was six or seven the first time I wondered—lying on my stomach in the front yard of our house in San Mateo, the grass cool, prickling against my bare belly, the light stippling through the leaves of the elms that ringed our yard and round a circle of children, siblings and friends, heads close together, whispering,
“What would you rather be: deaf or blind?”
“he needs
to quit drinking before he dies
of it. He says he hasn’t driven
in nine months, that he’s been
losing friends and took today
off work to get his act together.
I ask how he plans to stop
and he says he’s just going to.”
