And in the last paragraph she asks about me,
ghost child of a publicly nameable father, child
of my mother’s hidden sister: little solemn one
in photographs the color of old maps, clutching
a spray of flowers and a doll. Some things,
even unknown, are true; some things lend
shade to the length of a life.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

(A mostly found poem of palindromes.)

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

~ Je Ne Regrette Rien

On Sunday, the seventh anniversary of his death, she will walk to the Delaware river, light candles, set a little cup of flowers adrift.

Wasn’t this where they dredged for his body, brought it ashore, pockets empty of identification, cleaned-out car found a week later, many parking lots away?

When I first spoke to her on the phone some years after not knowing where she had gone, I heard Gounod playing in the background.

Rain or sleet rattled on the windows; water knocked discordant symphonies against the ancient plumbing.

The years have brought no balm for me, she says; all work is sublimated grief.

I get postcards from her whenever she travels, which is often; a blanket woven from yak hair in Tibet, where she has gone to start a school for women; inks and polished bone.

Jars of grey-tinted salt from France, sun-dried tomatoes from Italy, a tooled leather folder from a workshop in the city where Dante was born.

Just this morning I was explaining allegory to my daughter: the meaning of the wood, the threshold of the crater lake, the circles upon circles of souls; the way station, the bus stop, the climb out again in search of heaven and the muse…

But always, at this time of year, my friend who has been abroad so much circles back, returns.

There is nothing I really want now for myself from this world, she writes on hotel stationery in Amsterdam, or New York, or overlooking a marbled plaza where pigeons descend to fight for bread that tourists have thrown.

Sometimes I wish to just quietly go away.

In my mind, I listen for the plink of coins in the fountains’ shallow basins: their bronze arc in the air, their weight in impossible wishes softened by a film of green moss covering the stones.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

~ With thanks to Wilfredo Pascual

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

And he was the son of a man he knew only by name and the long
stub of ash before it fell from the cigarette into the tray—

And she on the other hand was a child when her mother expired
in that unfortunate flowering of war, when a soldier ran

a bayonet through her brother’s heart— There in the field,
that wound pried open in the shape of a gaping mouth—

Even now, they recount how long lines of men walked
south and farther south in the heat— For days

furtive foraging in paddies for snails and frogs,
for draughts of water thickened with mud— For days

their hands, roped and stacked behind their heads—
Pliable like leaves and tender, the shoots

you couldn’t guess you could mash with your teeth
and hold like a shield against the roof of your mouth.

In response to Via Negativa: Invitation to the mouth.

How much time do we have, led in
and out of the maze-like woods?

The river quarrels noisily with the rain—
always, it tries to be more than it is.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.