The Skins of Possible Lives
Blinking Yellow Books, Taos, NM, 1996. Wood block prints by Bill Gersh
previous page |

Loose Change

How to manage this correspondence,
or any, for that matter.
Leaving without sign or signature,
a hand pushed into concrete before it dries.
Yet another set of unlived possibilities,
a sudden hailstorm just as suddenly over.
Imprints, sketches on the underside of skin,
words etched into new places, refusing
to accept the impossibility of anything.
There’s nothing but sagebrush here;
what was once ocean turning forever
into its absence, but the air still breathes salt.
Nothing much lasts, not even this absence
in its present form.  But some decisions
are definite, knife-slicing, full of blood.
And in all that red, all the daring to refuse.
Perhaps nothing lasts.  But there’s still
seventy-two cents worth of loose change
on the carpet, and a few feathers
from a dead, red-breasted bird
the cat dragged in before they made love.

Following the Kickball

Mrs. McHugh used to spell secrets
to my grandmother.  I always knew the words.
Someone left.  The long disappearance of footfall,
an empty corridor where the step’s sound
breaks the vacuum, defies natural law.

My family is a constellation.  The individual
stars are harder to make out over distance.
Silhouetted in doorways, the patriarchal aura
of my grandfather.  There’s always my mother
standing there, too, saying goodbye again.

She must’ve climbed the long hill
of Prospect Street, her child tight
to her chest, the two-story green
clapboard house emptied behind her,
the child’s heart touching her own.

When I was a kid, I’d take my grandfather’s
shoes off over his brown, gout-swelled ankles,
I’d unravel my grandmother’s good silver
wrapped in thick plastic under starched,
white napkins.  Now, over a telephone,
I hear a strange old woman’s voice call to her
from hospital bed to hospital bed.
I am far away again as she tells me:
Everything’s changed now.

The light shifts faster than I can follow it.
I remember the little red schoolhouse,
the sharp incline at the back of the playing field,
how the red kickball always tumbled between trees,
making its swift descent into the deeper woods.

Sawing till the Wood Sings

At first, the hand aches,
saw weighing on tensed muscle,
fingers seized on metal,
a grip that sets her teeth grating.
Back and forth, the long serrated blade
grinds the old cedar posts, useless
for anything but burning.
Then slowly, the loosening of her grasp,
letting the tool at hand do its work,
her vigor simply guiding it
over the wood’s irregular surface.
The sound of her labor shifts.
Her face muscles relax, teeth unclench,
then, as if to answer her with her own unfamiliar song,
the wood whispers, the saw echoes its own cry,
and together—her strength, the aging wood, the metal tool—
are synchronized, wholly working,
uttering a strain she imagined once,
but never heard.

back to top