The summer we met you wrote:

 what it would be like to wake with a lover

   as accustomed as the sparrow’s serenade

   beautiful in its simplicity

   dear in its ordinariness 

Fourteen winters on

you call to me, urgent, from somewhere downstairs

deep in the recess of our house — go quick! to the kitchen

window! go! go! look!

I put down my pen, set aside the poem I am

always trying to write, reach the pane as your awestruck

voice fills the house: snow sparrows! snow sparrows!

— they are unlike any bird — part seagull, robin, polar fox —

tramping out a crisscrossed code in the snow,

never before seen in these parts, but they have found

our house, the one where every inch of lawn

is rock garden, flower bed or fish pond, all the work

of your hand and green thumb. The first three days

of this newborn arctic spring, they light rare awe-

some beauty on our simple, accustomed, ordinary life.

I meant dog

I meant god

I meant not worth dog god

I meant god not on a glob

I meant not gob on bog

I meant words worth notten

I meant ton north nothing

I meant not words writhing

I meant swords words fighting

I meant worth words writing

I meant blog

the gnarled
word
was once
green, it too
was newborn,
supple, straight,
kind
the kind
to have and to hold
but death
lay like a seed
in the bitter root

You had a favourite poem

once but can’t

find it it was blue, the cover

and the author was Marco Polo something or other

but wait, there was another one another

language

which is your favourite

what about the early ones your first words from masters

Donne and Blake

who would you take – isn’t this what it comes down to – to a desert island

or is that deserted island, people say desert, what about

a thesaurus take that

instead of a favourite poem

but okay, yes,

this is not a trip

to a beach where the mermaids sing each to each

but not for you

what about that white book with the thin words on the front, a tinge of pink

some southern man

or another – here’s what to do, look through

all the books, forget covers and names

don’t read the poems,

rather look in the margins for your own pressing slant: find the poem

that made you have to write.

Greenish bluish velvety NSB upholstery,

ornamented with arrow tips, yellow specked,

widely spread, someone’s idea of beauty,

a designer, who went to school to learn

the art of textile, and celebrated with friends

this career boost: a commission to bedeck

the carriages of the NSB local Gardemoen – Drammen.

The greenish bluish upholstery of the past,

a past Norway I passed through when these

seats were new, and so was I, and hope

sat in a seat between us.

There was a poem somewhere in the air
but it didn’t rhyme, it was
feeling something about meaning
something about feeling something
or was it thinking some things
are for thinking, some for meaning

it got lost
the air was too cold
dark bus exhaust snow

but it ended like this: someone
left a pen for me in the room that was well swept
it wasn’t left for me, it was left, and it was me
who came into the room so early it was dark
in the windows, the chairs scattered
the pen was white, small red words on it said:
better work, better life.

Har du ikke sydd gardiner ennå?
spurte Olga
den dagen
hun fikk sønnen
til å kjøre henne forbi
det gamle huset
som var mitt nytt hus
som hadde vært
hennes drømmehus
den gang hun var en ung brud

hun pekte på den skravlete
hagen, den falleferdig trapp
og jeg lærte ett nytt ord
provisorisk
lurte på om jeg også
skulle få bruk for det ordet
en dag

jeg trodde Bodø skulle slå av lyset
gatelys ihvertfall, lysløype lys
lyslampene langs E-6

jeg trodde jeg kunne stå i vinduet
og se ut over Hunstadmoen
at lysene sluknet en etter en
i alle mans hus over det ganske land

som en baklengs nyttårsaften
istedenfor lys og flamer spruklende over alt
jeg ville se lysene gå ut
en etter en i alle rom i alle husene
og i gatene imellom husene
til og med billys skulle slukkes
ja, det skulle bli så mørkt at til og med
de syv levende lys jeg hadde tenkt
i stuevinduet ville skinne altfor blindende
at også de måtte slukkes

jeg trodde alt skulle bli bare mørkt
midnattmørk kl 2030 på en lørdags kveld
helmørk, en ny mørk for en ny time

slik at mine øyne ville åpne
og svelge mørkheten som om det var lys
mørkheten et nytt lys å vende seg til

og etterhvert ville jeg kunne se
at det sto folk i alle stuevinduer
i alle hus, at det lystet fra ansiktene
hele familier som sto og blunket
og betraktet hverandre i den nye
blindende skimmrende
nakne verden

I have the keys and the security pass
I have the newer car

He has a plastic bag tied in a knot
carrying five homemade VHS tapes

They have his handwriting on the spine
some of them have mine

This is a rendez-vous arranged
after hours at my school
to record from expiring video tapes onto DVD
the anctics of our infant daughter and seven year old
in the first red house we owned
on a street lined with silver maples
named Hubbard after the nursery rhyme

In the DVD room of the library
on pause with her back to the camera
is our oldest daughter
as if waiting on a film set for the “action” call

He presses turbo-dubbing on the remote
and she turns, blond hair flying,
smiles at the camera with one tooth gone
wearing the tee shirt I never appreciated (until now,
where is that tee shirt, in the attic somewhere? it was
a hand-painted stylized flag designed by the wife
of the director at Broom Street Theater
for my costume in “Joe, A Life”)

Here she is at the sink in the kitchen
there is the brown plaid carpeting on the floor
there is the window filled with a tree

There she is pointing to her sister in the crib
we borrowed from the neighbor
the little baby sister with the heavy head
the same one who texted me just now saying
Will you pick us up smiley face
on her way to a concert

(The oldest one herself right now
planning her own first child
in a distant town)

He leans back in the office chair
which almost breaks under his weight
as I point out the step-by-step instructions
the staff is so proud of around here
the configurations of transfer from VHS to DVD
that we obtained like a druid science
and wrote down on a laminated card

He says that DVD is going by the wayside too

What will we do then, I wonder
as in one machine the old tape whirs
and in the other the bald disc tick-ticks
as the video player and DVD recorder
pass scenes of the children between them
like buckets in a fire brigade: Here, comrade,
take the naked baby in the crib, take the girl
now she is in blue jean cut-offs
now her hair has gotten short

He says there were more tapes, one from Rio years earlier
I remember it showed me twirling around the living room
our first-born inside my taut belly
my brother behind the camera making me laugh
and there was the one from my dad’s last visit
the tape with the yellow spine
found in the video camera at the bus stop where he died
in the video camera so big you had to prop it on your shoulder

I had gotten so tired of it, but he kept telling me to film more
film all of it, everybody, my aunts, uncles, my mother, daughter, him
keep filming honey all these situations here
as if he knew the next day he’d be gone

The only people who don’t show up on that tape
except as background voices, are me (who was holding the camera)
and the man who is sitting in this office chair
the man who was once a man who was my husband
the man who was once a man I wanted to marry and did
the man who was a different man from this one
this is the man I wanted to say not to
and finally did on a day in April on the path in front of our house
(this was red house number 2)
I don’t know what became of that other man
at what point, or where, he was gone

or where those tapes have gone

And now he is saying there was a box of small cassette films
they were the next generation after VHS
they were the modern ones we took over a decade ago
where are those?

You must have them, I say
No, I only have these two and my kite ones, he says
But you took the television and all the tapes.
I thought so too, but they must be in the filing cabinet, he says
The filing cabinet?
The metal filing cabinet.
What metal filing cabinet?
The one with two drawers.
You took that to put under your desktop.
No I took the wooden one.
I have the wooden one.
No, I am talking about the small gray metal one.
You must have that under your desk.
No, I didn’t take that one.
I’ve don’t know where there’s a metal filing cabinet in the house.
The tapes were lying in the back of the bottom drawer.
Yes, I remember it under your desk.
Maybe we got rid of it.
Why would we get rid of it?
It was useless, he says, two hollow drawers like wheelbarrows.
Yes, things were lying loose in it under your desk.

Maybe we threw it out in Hawaii.
Then it can’t be where the video tapes are.

Maybe they are with the camera, he says.
You mean the broken video camera I’ve been meaning to throw out?
It works if you can find the cord.
If it works why didn’t you take it?
It can be used to make VHS tapes out of those cassettes, if you find the cords.
I don’t know about any cords.
They’d be in the bag with the camera.
There is no bag, the camera is lying on a shelf, I thought it was broken.
Then the tapes are in a box.
I was going to throw the video camera out like we did that other one, I say.
What other one?
The digital camera from Hawaii.
I have that, it sort of works.
You have that old camera? Then you must have all the tapes.
I thought so too, but there are only these two
only these two you might call Family Ones, Baby Nadine 1 and Baby Nadine 2

I’ll look at home, I say

I tell him there are a lot of things I wonder where they are
among other things all the books he got rid of

I got rid of? he says

Yes you sold all my books to Ron Czerwin for $300, I am constantly
coming upon books I don’t have any more, like the one that was side-by-side parallel columns comparing the teachings of Jesus and Confuscious

Why did you get rid of that? he laughs
That was your decision, not mine!

No, I wasn’t making decisions
all the decisions were yours
all the decisions were his
I didn’t know what a decision was

And anyway, he says, you can buy the books back again

I tell him I used to think so too but if there is one thing I have learned
it is that you can’t just buy books back again, they’re not in every town
does he know how long I have searched for some of those books, like
the Salman Rusdie I couldn’t find in San Francisco, not in London either
no not Satanic Verses, the one called Shame, that takes place in the Defense Society in Karachi near my uncle’s house…

Did you look online? he says

… I found it of all places in a Trondheim charity shop

And anyway, he says, there are libraries everywhere full of books

I tell him that speaking of libraries my book group was reading Hamsun so I went to the library
and there on the shelf was my fifteen-volume red-covered Hamsun collected works
the very same one I had from 1984, I had to check out my own book

There you see, there are collections all over the place, he says

Ron Czerwin got my collected works of Ibsen too.

There is no tension between us, there is nothing between us
just some kind of amused irony in the air
and now the big girl is practicing strapping the baby girl
into the car seat that is standing on the living room floor on the flowered rug

We would agree about what happened to the flowered rug

And there is the brick fireplace, my wing chairs, the chairs I loved
and the horrible kitchen carpet and white walls I didn’t know how to get rid of
and my oval split-oak library table, there are the straight back chairs I refinished one by one
(why those chairs, why my birds-eye maple table, why were all of them gotten rid of?)
and there is the brown stove, that hated two-tone brown enamel, the white formica top
there is me wearing stupid bangs, dressed in a white nylon track suit
glancing unwillingly at him behind the camera, my eyes dark and vacant
chaos all around me of things I loved and didn’t love and could have changed
but didn’t know how

There was so much I didn’t know how

And he is saying that now that it’s started this tape will just have to run
it might go on for six hours

I say the DVD will be full in two
the laminated instructions say it will turn itself off
I say I’ll do some work, go swimming, come back at eight o’clock

He ties his kite videos up in the bag
along with the useless CD-R discs he brought
follows me into the library stacks
I am juggling my heavy keys in my hand
I am slowing down in the center of all these books
the library is dark but there is light from somewhere
from somewhere there is light enough

Is it just to walk out? he asks
Yes, I say, it is just to walk out.

In a childhood
full of bad times
sad times, despair
there is only one
bad Christmas
memory

(besides the one
which I myself
made bad
by peeking into
every last present
ruining the surprise
of Christmas
but unable to stop myself
at age 11, the last gift
a brown wire-limbed
long and limber
yogi with red turban
which I would have loved
but instead hated
for being so lovely)

it was Detroit
ca 1960, the tree
was triangular
as good trees are
and Dad was on the ladder
putting up lights
or a star (or have I
just seen this on tv?)
and Mom was standing by
lending a hand or offering
irritating advice
they were on edge
there was tension
the electric lights
weren’t working

there was music
which annoyed them
accentuating as it did
their sour mood
and Dad said Turn off the radio
and Mom said I DID
turn off the radio
and they sent my sister
to turn off the radio
for I was too small
and she came back saying
she, too, had turned
off the radio
but still the music played
and the lights weren’t working
and the ladder was unsteady
and Mom was jittery
and Dad was angry

and the damned music
just made it all worse
so one of them, or all of us,
marched out of the room
to put an end to it
following the strains
past the dead radio
to the front door
behind which stood
a small chorus of carolers
repeating a refrain
over and over
with the patience of Christ
believing in their hearts
that someone, we
were home

The woman who once
on a whim in a bookstore
pointed to a book on the shelf
and said, I’ll buy you that.

It was a small square book
the kind that is full of quotations
small pearls of wisdom
a miniature coffee table book
made to be browsed through
to achieve random moments
of inspiration.

It was called GENEROSITY.

I don’t want it, I wanted to say
but I didn’t
I didn’t dare not say Thank You
and force a little smile
over the gift
that felt heavy in my hand
square and compact as it was
with potential criticism
no thanks, I wanted to say

but I said Thank You

because on one page
of that little book
was a definition of generosity
that said Generosity
is what you do
when you don’t want to
but do it anyway.

from insistent clichés
that entrench upon my brain
like a front
of sleep-dead soldiers
save me
from impotent metaphors
jettisoning
from a flaccid pen
save me
from ambitions
of proving profundity
give me
a word
that is mine
my own
one word
that will end this
and begin
a poem

It is my mother’s season
the end of November
foggy winter
the evening time of year
when day looks like night
and clouds rise from the ground.

It will always be
the Saturday before Thanksgiving
that she awoke at dawn
sat up
on the edge of her bed
put her hands down
one on each thigh
and died
without blinking an eye
when the angel came
out of her walk-in closet
carrying a brown and white
baby saddle shoe
flattened from years
of lying in the bottom
of one of her boxes of papers.

Her sacrosanct papers
hidden under the crossed lids
of cardboard boxes
bound in strapping tape
and carried from house to house
state to state
in and out of moving vans
like the talmud
the host
or any unapproachable sacred text.

In one of the boxes
I found the other flattened
brown and white saddle shoe
(the one the angel left behind
for there must have been a pair)
and a brown bottle of Ritalin
prescribed to my grandmother
by Doctor Poser in the 1970s
no wonder Ma always sat
drumming her fingers on the table
saying Nei, nei, det e ikkje greit å være i Amerika!
gumming a smile
rocking back and forth
in her straightback chair.

I did not question
why my mother saved those pills
for nearly twenty-five years.
They might come in handy
was how she thought, she wasn’t
the go-to-the-doctor type.
But whose shoe was it
this hardly worn Baby’s First Shoe
and why was it there
along with documentation
of her name change from Tallulah
(how she scorned her parents taste
in naming her after a movie star)
to Sylvia, and poetry scraps
drafts and redrafts of lines of verse
and of her own letters
which she wrote and rewrote
to get just right, keeping a copy
for herself as evidence, proof
of what she did and did not say
in case someone should accuse
and because it pleased her
to re-read what she wrote
and enjoy once again
being well spoken and right.

My mother did not know
that somehow
that day
even though she had closed the blinds
and bolted her bedroom door
from the inside
the angel would get into her closet
and she would die
she did not expect this
or she would have destroyed
the draft of a letter she wrote
to a man, a married man, a doctor
circa anno 1970
her long well formulated cursive
tilting firmly to the right
something insistent and sulky
between the lines
about them meeting again
or not or where or why
it was not like my mother to whine
or hurl the words your wife
like a knife.

But there it was
and I remembered the time she left
my sister and me to babysit, it was night
and Paul lay upside down on his bunkbed
bracing his feet on the paneled wall
crying When is mommy coming home?
When is mommy coming home?
as we jeered and mocked him
we didn’t know why or where she went
only that she had gone in a taxi
because though in her forties
she didn’t know how to drive yet.

I didn’t tell anyone about that letter
except maybe my husband
if I was still telling him everything then
I don’t remember, all I know is that
when it got to be four, five o’clock
and it seemed my mother
had still not gotten up
he kicked down the bedroom door
took two steps in
and turned around nodding
She’s dead
How do you know? I said
pushing past him
and there she sat
staring straight ahead
one hand on each thigh, like Buddha
if Buddha had ever sat
on the edge of a daybed
her enormous belly
bearing the blue scar
wide as a tire track
where first my dead brother
and then the other two
were pulled out.
I didn’t recognize my own voice
a child wailing My mommy!
My mommy! My mommy!
anymore than I recognized
the possibility that this woman
my mother
would have allowed herself
to be caught dead
wearing neon pink bikini briefs.

But there she was
up at dawn
in black bra and pink underwear
on the Saturday before Thanksgiving
when I was supposed
to take her shopping
for something to wear to her sister’s
but she had taken the other
brown and white shoe
and gone, not caring
for the first time in her life
what anyone thought
of her body
or if anyone read
her papers
or how disgraceful the house looked
to neighbors
if the blinds weren’t drawn.

After the burial
clouds rose from the ground
shrouding the tombstones
at the pioneer church
and Aunt Lucille said
isn’t this weather just like Sylvia
as we drove to her house
for Thanksgiving leftovers
blinded by fog
and the impenetrable black.

Give me something
to write a poem about
a reason to write
an observation
an insight
a moment
turned inside out
said the girl
to her teacher
who said, Describe for me
a spiral staircase. Don’t
use your hands.

That’s a cliché
said the girl, that’s
been said before
and what does it really mean
anyway?

Does it have to mean
anything? said the teacher.
A poem should not mean
but be.

Be what? said the girl.
What’s the point? I get to the end
and what’s the point, who cares?
And most of all – how do I know
it’s a poem if it doesn’t rhyme?

How do you know it is a poem
if it does rhyme? said her teacher
as she ran a long brown finger
over a pear, a plum, a mango
lying in a bowl between them.
A poem, she said
should be palpable and mute.
Like a globed fruit.

That rhymed! said the girl.
Say, did you just make all that up?
No, said the teacher, it was
Archibald Macleish
and the girl said, I think
I heard a him, yeah
I’m pretty sure
I saw him once on TV.

Lawrence is dead
you said
in a sms
I could read
even without my glasses on
the words so incongruous
they stood out
like boldface

Lawrence who you
hated and cursed
Lawrence who
saved your life
against your will
at the turn
of the millenium

Lawrence the other half
of the dream team
your significant
other of a sort
that only he
knows, but now
all that

Lawrence knows
or knew is buried
in the medieval churchyard
where once
you found a piece of skull
and took it home
or was it a jaw
and did you tell

Lawrence? it was
the sort of thing
he may not have understood
his understanding of you
was running thin
in those days
and you told him
you were
letting him go

Lawrence asked you to
put it in writing
and you did
in the language
of the government
not the language
you and he used
when word by word
he got you, taught you
to match word
to thought
the way jaw
matches skull

Lawrence cannot
be lying in a churchyard
like a full stop
there was no notice
no stays no bans
we were not getting
the newspaper

Lawrence gone
to where the dead go
taking the you he knew
along, dead, dead dead
do the dead
proclaim our name in song
and we who hear the echo
do we, should we
sing along

Lawrence, the name
is carved on a stone
at the place he stopped
and lay down in the ground
go there
scream at him
as you once
would have done

Lawrence
goddamn you
Lawrence
I hate you
Lawrence
this isn’t fair
Lawrence
this isn’t done

Lawrence knows
how you turned to the wall
he waited, believing you
would turn back around
he knew you would live
and knows even now
you will turn back
from his grave
to live
and love
and carry on

i.
the first northern lights of the year
shimmer dim brilliance
the wind kicks up
and the animals want us to come out and play
though it is dark
and you have gone early to bed

ii.
the newly gilded Hansa roses
flame against the red of our house
just the way you said they would
when you planted them
small twigs
that held the promise
of rosehips

iii
there is half a cake on the freezer
a wild berry torte
left over from Con Brio 45 years
the chamber choir
born half way between our birth cries
where we both now sing
where we met over a single lost gold pencil
that when found
turned out to have never been lost at all

iv
you made the cake
carried it to the party
in a cake box labeled
with my ex-mother-in-law’s name
in old school cursive
on masking tape
that has brittled and easily pulls off

v
she must have wanted that cake box
returned
and I must have meant to do it
or thought he should
her son
and he didn’t, leaving it for me
and there it sat
in our mutual neglect and refusal
while the old woman
climbed the seventy-five steps
from basement to attic
so many times
she forgot what she was looking for

When I walk to school
a forward movement
(for the most part)
Garrison Keillor
counts the days for me
backward in time
This is the Writer’s Almanac
for Sunday October 11th
This is the Writer’s Almanac
for Saturday October 10th
This is the Writer’s Almanac
for Friday October 9th

So by the time I reach school
it is last week
when I know everything that happened
when everyone one I know
was still alive
and none of us knew for sure
that we would arrive here
today
at school on time
with a plan
that might or might not
work

distracting blur
moth wings
by my lamp
ash
from a cold hearth
snow
from the cold earth
everything
stirs
with the same chaotic turn
everything
blurs
my sight of this world
this bleeding
watercolor
landscape

There is something burning yellow flames
against Turid’s wall where before
was green

The hedge that finally camouflaged
her laundry line has been chopped
and shorn

Holes in the papyrus leaves
that hang like wet parchment
curling in

The magpies have turned
first into crows and now into
eagles

There was a longing for you
an ache, a tear in the sky one spring
long ago

Now you are in the kitchen clinking pans
pulling drawers, shuffling spoons, soon you will call
tea time!

Or, because you think I am occupied with some
important word-work, you will slip in, take the cup
fill it

Bring me my meds in a small dish shaped like a leaf
saying out of sight, out of mind! which means
don’t forget

And I have forgotten what it looked like outside my window
when there was no yellow no green nothing to write on
no you

if she had the baby
or had an abortion
or knew the father
or brought him back
with her, the girl
who told me she
was an exchange student
in Ori Michigan last year
saying I was there two weeks
then got pregnant
and was sent home
in a perfect Midwestern
monotone, adding that she
still has contact
with her host mother
who is coming to Norway
to visit her at Christmas
and I wonder at the ties
the halfhitched over and
underhanded nontrivial
trefoil knots that can be
wound and pulled taut
to bind and choke
in no more time than
it takes a plane to land
and jetlag to wane
in a flat-roofed small town
on the brink of nowhere

We lie in bed with the windows wide so the summer curtains billow into the room with the midnight breezes flowing down from the mountains across the fjord on a night that looks like day, and it could be day except for how tired we feel and the noctural critters we just photographed in the flower beds: a frog and a hedgehog, all the birds are quiet and even the dog has put himself to bed.

The neighbor is awake and has visitors, a man and a woman have joined Per on his patio which we know for sure is a stone’s throw from our bedroom balcony because on New Years you and I wrote 2009 intentions on a Tibetan paper lantern which, once lit and launched, dove and perched aflame on Per’s railing and I didn’t know what I feared most: burning down his house or him discovering the charred remnants of what I had written.

It is Per and the woman we hear talking, first in normal intermittant tones, but by the time we have settled, you cupping your whisky while I read aloud from Moby Dick – the cetology of whales in Book II (Octavo) Chapter IV (Killer) in which Melville reasons the name holds no distinction “for we are all killers on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included” – the talk on the patio next door has gotten louder.

Are they arguing? you ask in a whisper and I lay Melville down to listen. If they are it is on the order of The Rowan Berries Are Early This Year So That Means We’ll Have Snow No It DOESN’T It Means It Will Be Mild I say and go back to reading but it is difficult to ignore their voices which are now in the room and getting louder, the woman gaining the lead with words that carry her spit, a ballast of spite, hate, blame, disgust.

I get up and shut the door and windows, gently so they won’t hear, and return to my reading, but it’s no use. Melville’s cetology cannot compete and you get up curious to hear what they are talking about and open the window facing the patio as if you are on an adventure but I lie motionless worried, ashamed, as if listening to my parents’ muffled row.

I want you to stop swinging the window so it creaks on its hinges and they could hear you listening to them, they will be mad at us, we’ll be in trouble, but you want them to hear and get interrupted and stop their bickering or at least take it inside and I wonder why I feel I am the one who has done something wrong, the way I used to fear the neighbors could hear the bellowing that shook the walls between his rage and my mute tongue during those final days when we fought unchecked all day long while the kids were at school and neither of us at work.

The woman seems upset about the way people are around here, you report returning to bed and I tell you I am reminded of me and him and you say Oh and I read on through the chapter called First Night-Watch.

In the morning you put your arms around me and ask if I had also been reminded of us and I say no of course not we don’t fight and you grin and say we could try where did you put the teapot why did you put it there that’s no good that was dumb

and I say I only put it where it has to be since your coffee pot took up all the room and then we giggle, you see it doesn’t work, I say, but you decide to spend the rest of the day trying to pick a fight, a glint in your eye at the challenge, the sport of tossing I’m the only one who does anything around here into the hoop of you’re not listening to what I said and I grow weary of trying to take offense.

That night as we lean in the open kitchen window looking at the koi swim in the pond you make one last attempt, something about the three buckets of weeds I aim to pick each day getting left standing around unemptied, each with a garden spade left in – don’t forget the pair of gloves I say – yes, that’s why I can never find any gloves you say and behind those three buckets are the three buckets from the day before, and three from the day before that – I would empty them, I say, if you left room in the compost but now I can’t do any more weeding because all the buckets are full and I can’t empty the weeds because there’s no room in the compost so things have ground to a halt in the garden I guess we’ll just have to sell the house.

And so on it went, our argument, but we were laughing so hard the pee started running and we had to hang our heads out the window and gasp for air and pound the sills with our fists and fall back into the room doubled over on the floor and I marveled at how this laughter could make me feel so drunk.

The next day at waffles my daughter age fourteen says What was wrong with you two last night? We look uncomprehending until she says, You could have woken up the whole neighborhood, carrying on in the middle of the night … We still can’t get what she means until she says, you were laughing so loud I was afraid the neighbors could hear, something about weeds…

we look at each other – Weeds?! The Neighbors Could Hear!? – and die laughing all over again.

one shot was of her dancing feet turned
elegantly inward like paired swans
she wore high heels
and roller skates
and flew upwards, backwards
as I caught her in my lens
but there was sand, mud on the glass
I rubbed it clean with my shirt corner and spit

the camera had been tossed on the ground
so many times during this scene
which had a horse in it and children
and swings and a two dimensional sand lot
I was among the visitors or the only visitor
to these old familiar friends

at the moment we tune in to the scene
I am leaving or preparing to leave
perhaps it is the round of goodbyes
that takes on a circus show aspect
with the woman, my friend, someone
who loved and appreciated me, dancing
from end to end of the canvas

there was a straw duck, like an egg basket
for the breakfast table, but seated by it
a real duck with an emerald eye took position
like a mirrored reflection, a complimentary
Janus if I could position the shot just right

the scene ended before I ever got to leave
or to find out if my camera lens showed only mud
or to remember what was so wonderful about this
place, all these people among whom I belonged
but nonetheless was just passing through

Uses silence
space, distance
quiet
all the elements of peace
taken up as weapons

Watches the thief
doesn’t speak
doesn’t speak
doesn’t speak