Here, poems still being pieced together will appear from time to time.

November

My brother and I stood barefoot in our pajamas
in a doorframe with a bedsheet for a door
and watched our father work
to soothe our mother’s crying,
her earache having burned a hole
inside the drum.

Her hair hung down, uncombed and damp,
and covered up her face.
A nightgown strap had fallen down her shoulder.
She looked like someone else’s mom,
the way she sobbed into the cushion’s
huge embroidered roses.

Our father sat beside her, on the sofa’s edge
not touching her, but lighting up a cigarette,
and when she moaned and shook,
he dragged and blew a breath of smoke into her ear.

This helps to ease the pain, he said,
and even though she pulled away,
he tried again. Give me a chance, he said,
to make it better. He leaned over her ear
as if to speak a secret only she could hear,
his words ascending into grey
and haze above their heads.

That night, the snow began.
Sent back to sleep, we both stood on our beds
and held the curtain back
to see the season shift from frost to ice

With all the lights turned out, we watched it fall,
thin flakes at first like cinders blowing down
from some old fire, and then a softening of darkness
like all the good intentions of our lives.

At winter’s edge and through the glass,
the path worn to the woodshed disappear s.
In moonlight’s silver, the leafless poplars glow.

Cellar Door:

“Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful' . . . More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.” – J.R.R. Tolkien: “English and Welsh”

More beautiful than salt that falls into a keyhole,
or gold poured over shells and forests,
or bells rung over olive groves in Rome?
More beautiful, perhaps.

But in your native tongue, these words, this cellar door,
it clanks and locks together, one steely cell that closes on itself,
and you, down there in concrete walls, all wires and code.
How normal is a modern dungeon?

Two flights of stairs above your head,
your mother pours his tea and irons his pants
in a kitchen breezed by garden wind
and seasons you lose track of.

She sleeps beside him night on night, while you,
anemic in the must and dim, you wash your cup and plate
again, again unfold and fold your sheet and blanket.
Now what? I want you to keep busy, find chores
to move the days along and make the hours pass,
not stare at your reflection in a tarnished kettle.

I want to cut a key that turns
the darkness back to light, that unbolts
the world you’re given and frees the sky
from kiteless slate to blue and fireworks.
I want to tear down all your calendars
and fix your broken clock, and make him stop.

A photo of the moon is the not the moon,
and beauty, not the cellar door you lean against
when he has left you for the night
to dream of light through window shutters,
or alpine flowers breaking into stars
and feathers on the mountain,
or concrete smoking after rain,
and outside, outside,
the cobbled alley ringing
with the bicycles of children.