Concrete steps and a rail.

Ashes, water, sand—dispersal and recollection.

The way things pile up and get forgotten.

Duende, written on a road sign. Untranslatable I said, something like spirit. Goblin said my mother, sometimes elf.

The thought that crows ought to be circling, though none circled.

Militant little children all lined up in a row, pink heads bobbling.

The scent garden—sharp spice of dianthus, lilies, heady hyacinth.

Watering the morgue.

A house a hill a house.

The steeple that pierced the air as if injecting it.

When the cold came, we retreated to the back room and climbed ladders to reach the heat.

A whole hoard of invisible jackknives.

Bees.

A chink between stones where the light slipped through.

The smell of nectar and onions.

The weird edge of the city where men gather like scavengers to fresh death.

Miserable dawns.

The duck pond, which was full of beavers.

A brick and flower memorial, a cross inlaid in stone beneath our feet.

Perpetual twilight.

A temple cleared of insides, blessings with nothing to catch on buzzing like June bugs. Twins appearing suddenly around every corner.

The nuthatch barely breathing beneath a window, the boy who cupped and lifted it. Kept it for days in a box.

The buzzy, beer-soaked cadence of a dream.

Sugar and drums.

The dark trains arriving like eager, squealing pigs.

Square tables made up of alternating black and white tiles.

Clefts, crevices, caverns, and caves.

The blooming apple orchard and feeling of heaven.

Red ants in the backyard, sugar ants in the kitchen.

Exactitude and limitation.

The barroom and its uncanny inhabitants.

Magnetism, animalism—a street dog in heat.

A church with two chapels, one above ground and one below. The way a voice sounded, loose and thin from the virgin’s lips, painted on the floor.

With the rain came new fruits, impossibly sweet.

Bluebells on the banks, sweet peas, stones to cross over the current, soaked
and fallen logs to cross—hazardous, a seeming omen.

The boy’s hair a territory, a bloody grove.

Everywhere grew black-eyed susans, stems so thick I had to use my teeth.

A box of words, a box of wounds.

Salt mines—collisions and accidents.

Bones in the room—coyote, deer, sparrow—cicada shells in a jar.

The nightclub singer singing like a cherub on speed—falsetto and babyish and brave.

Heels click-clacking on the gallery floor.

Bodies in night rooms, shards, and near catastrophes. 

Phantasmagoria.

“And is any voice not God’s voice?” you asked; your spine curled to my spine.

White beads, icicles, bells.

The potted plant expanded to fill the window and then stopped—what courage, I thought, to grow this way.

Charcoal and pastel renderings.

Ripped gills on the back, and miraculous, bulging eyes.

We had, in our hands, shovels.

Once in a blue moon a kiss.

All the while odds and ends falling away. Where did I put, I wonder, that hairpin, the dog treats, my mother’s scarf?

A precocious weed, the gardener says, medicinal.

On fire, a river; on fire, a bear.

Spring peepers and the bullfrog calling.

Making and unmaking the bed, without hands.

You named the oaks and often mislabeled the black walnut.

We were not on a very long mystical walk.

We were not ghastly.

We were not even wrong.

The sound of the house—burst pipes, toothpaste squelch, footfalls.

Christening the resident handyman, hammer and brush bearer, the one who fixes what we have broken with our carelessness.

A coffin, a barn door, a step ladder—and so the story goes. 

Returning with the light, a question—how we will live now?