This week light leaves the sky later and later,

and we are at it again, one more round,

 

plastic rackets in hand, soft swat answering

soft swat as we lob a mangled birdie across the lawn,

 

our collie mad with longing to catch the thing.

First serve and she rises, jaw thrust, torso

 

twisted in mid-air, then down, hard on her shoulder.

Second serve. She is up, up, and the missile—rent, bent—

 

is hers, her prize then dropped at your feet. World War II,

its Pacific theater, is your current obsession, son. We talk

 

Hickham Field, smashed beyond salvage; Leyte and Kamikaze;

enemies tunneling the volcano at Iwo Jima; then the cruel bomb.

 

Hirohito has collapsed, and we know that neither

ritual nor devotion can restore an empire or revive

 

the thousands who at Banzi Cliffs threw themselves

and their children over. It’s dark now, time to stop.

 

The birdie is lost in cold grass and the dog, hard-panting,

heart-pounding, seems spent at last.

 

 

 

others you pass through as if asleep, attention

at half-mast, the whole day scumbled, a blur.

 

Watch those old ladies who fish the bridge.

From aluminum lawn chairs, they squint

 

into the distance, measure remaining light

against live bait—minnows and crickets—

 

against ebbing tide and hunger. Watch

them knot lengths of string around raw

 

chicken necks, lower them into the swell,

too poor for a crab pot, too poor for a boat.

 

Watch her, the quiet one. She’s got a seahorse

in a Dixie cup, an eye for what engrosses.

 

 

 

We are of one mind at the garden center and it is fixed

on fuchsia, on new blooms from old wood. Halfhearted

 

shoppers, we’ve fled beds half-dug at home for these orderly

rows of budding azaleas, dogwoods rooted in burlap, gazing

 

globes in bubble wrap—searching for what, in truth,

we cannot say. We’ve negotiated the merits of vinca

 

major and minor, discussed the habits of weeping

camellia and the gardenia’s tenderness, when the lone

 

clerk approaches, hands pocketed and bill-cap pulled

low. Morning, folks—he pauses—May I ask,

how long have you been married? What has he seen?

Will he offer advice, condolences, congratulations?

 

I want to answer, Spring tide, mystery box, storm-sprung—

but ask instead, “Are these all your perennials?”—

as if I had not heard or understood his question.

I hear my husband, always game, ask: “What about you,

 

you married?” as I slip into the hothouse where plants

I love most are sheltered. Beam-bridge, shadow mask, neap tide.

Behind me, the clerk shouts—

“Thank you for letting me be a part of your day.”

 

 

 

Aboard the north-bound Palmetto we traded

stories. She said her father had been one

incarnation of evil, a regular Simon Legree—

No kidding—

Archie Bunker on a bender: Nigger. Africoon.

Incog-negro. Niglet, for the babies.

The meanest man she ever knew, and it was

his ashes she had hauled in a rented two-door

to the Eastern Shore. In the humid hours

of Virginia dusk, she steered off the main

road until she found a family, spread agreeably

across the yard, sinking into webbed

lawn chairs beneath rustling oaks,

and visible from the blacktop, an outhouse

to the rear, with a fine view of the creek.

She pulled up, stepped out, asked,

And suspiciously, they had consented.

Thus, her father’s cold ashes, consigned

then to the john, the pit-privy:

We parted at Penn Station—me, fresh

from the shore, her, unburdened, alone.

From Rockaway Beach to that outhouse,

she’d made the astonished prayer

of a child left behind, porter of peculiar

baggage hauled to the end of the line.