Arms balancing bags of soaked swimming gear, hair dryer, groceries, and dry cleaning, I stagger inside with snow blowing, boots covered, as ringing starts and I push hard against the wind to close the door.

I’d waited four months for the appointment. My hope for help had kept me moving the dead weight of my body from bed to shower to work each day. Each day I felt might be my last day. As empty as the room, I sat on the edge of the exam table. My head felt like a bowling ball. It was that heavy. I let it hang. 

These legs have carried me a long way, and must for a while longer.

Behind her, more translucent spirits float, as weightless as smoke in the breeze.

So the sky lives in me
but the dark?
I don't know where the dark lives.
It comes and goes.

The internet offers “oculus,” from antiquity. Named from the Latin for “eye,” this circular opening in the center of a dome or in a wall, none of which sounds right. If that is what this is.

It wasn’t to hear him speak/on piety and justice

my history–yes, I’m still hankering
after songs of money and love,
love and worry.

I could have lived without opening the car window if he didn’t smoke, but he did, and not just cigarettes but a pipe as well, and sometimes a cigar.  In our tight quarters, he managed to light a cigarette, place his pipe somewhere, and drive a stick shift.

The world went clanking like an old tin can,
a cranking babbler on its wind-whirled way,
tossed on immodestly, without restraint,
and little mercy from the tar it spanked;

Could have been worse, everyone said. / It wasn’t meant to be…

This river is like an ocean, force of the surf and wildness of the wind, but it’s a body of fresh water moving, boundaries on either side.

Sometimes you get lucky and walk out of your bombed apartment

But my eyes tell a different story. They’re squinty, looking off to the side, hiding my thoughts, my eyebrows ever so slightly furrowed as if I’m already questioning this whole pageant.

His father’s voice
came to him
in his dreams

learn
to be better turtles,
to stick their necks out…

I go down to plant a red amaryllis, ripping open the plastic bag of black dirt in the box when I can’t get the knot out…

Later, the sun poured over our shoulders
as we read our name
on the grave stones.

Were it not for the other mothers,/ fathers, families, and grandmother/ that kept it pulsing, my heart would be long dead./ They made it a sea, deep enough to weather storms,/ until a day, when love settled home, opened me up,/ and guided my heart’s tempest until it was repaired./ Remembering everything, my heart, at last, broke./ And now? All we feel is gratitude. 

…the moody sighing of beech leaves and the persistent grasping of rhizomes of grasses, the roots of pittosporum, as well as the hiss of nitrogen fixation by the underground nodules beneath the clover and, too, the industrious feeding of earthworms and termites…