Looking for you in the Historic Preservation District

I wrote this when Elizabeth was sixteen.

I went looking for you after you exploded and left the house--
I started at the park where we would go when you were four--
The roses and their stray petals we’d bring home and put in a bowl--
the grass, all fenced off now--
-- in the gazebo, a Jewish wedding,-- in the heat,
people were holding up the canopy, everybody wore a yarmulke.

You weren’t in the gazebo of course, or lingering around the sand pit
now moved and painted blue.
A boy, wet from running in the sprinkler,
pulled at his shorts .
Of course you wouldn’t be here.
You had already finished revisiting this place,
and printing a photo essay of children playing,
capturing the pure attachments that form in an instant:
not knowing each other one minute,
then voila friendship!

You weren’t running on the loading platforms,
now stripped of their overhangs.
“The neighborhood’s gotten so fancy!” you noticed eight years ago
when you were eight and skipped up and down the steps of each platform, now all gone, none of that any more, just oversize housing for the rich and their children.
The weather promised rain but the heat just keeps steeping and the steam just keeps soaking us with sweat. If it were raining you wouldn’t ask me if we could
jump in the puddle on Harrison where the biggest pothole in New York City
used to make a splash basin. You are not there.

I walk down West Broadway and see the sign
--Paste Paper and Push for your business—
old and faded but not gone, a remnant of an age gone by.

Where are you my darling? My beautiful one?

Please come home and forgive me.



http://flickr.com/photos/indieink/573388546/

How She Played Badminton

She was fast,
she was strong,
she was canny, but mostly she had
the stamina to outlast you no matter how fast
you thought you could run
She could run faster
Her legs went on for miles
For every step that she took
you would have to take twenty
She was limber
and she could stretch down to the ground
and then up to the sky in a matter of seconds
How she dominated the court,
the net held up with two fallen branches from the maples out front
In her prime she did not rely on a net game
faking you out. She revelled in the chase, the running game,
and it was fun to indulge this passion
and challenge yourself to see how much you could run before she would outdo you.
Sending the birdie back to the same place
over and over again
(left corner was her weakness)
On long volleys I would send it there
and she would return to me
bang
Her wrist relaxed snapping the racket til it shot
the feathers across

The neighbor who took the game so seriously
called her devil child


She was invincible

The nestling fell

The nestling fell from the tree near the back porch just about dawn.
My cat who visits me in my lap
and looks at me with sweetness and dependence and gratitude
burrowing his snout into my hand as I pet him,
that creature snapped up the nestling and carried
him in his mouth proudly, his tail swaying like
a victorious pennant.

After much subterfuge
we got him to open his mouth
and the nestling fell out.
Of course it could never be the same.
His mother in a proper outrage
screamed a full five minutes
a single harsh note over and over again

I love life
just not my life
that goes on without her

The days begin today for instance
with perfect clarity
the sky blue, the water tower
across the street puncturing the blue
with its pointed tip.
But she is still gone
and tonight my last thought before
turning out the light will be
still gone.

At the Polling Place

My name is always first
above my husband's
first initial P
before first initial R
Even though I always forget which district
I'm in, the ladies at the tables are nice
They turn the pages of the big spiral bound notebook
to our signatures. There is my name
and Richard's, but above both of ours
for the first time is another.
I wonder, whose?

It is our daughter's,
aged eighteen, who had registered
to vote, but never got to because she died.
What would you do? I came to vote
for president, but I stood there and I cried.

In the Shower

The Pantene Pro V so belonged to her.
I am almost done with it,
have almost used it up--
one less object that she touched,
one less reminder daily of her beauty,
her long blond hair and its clean smell.
I can’t cry on cue the way he wants me to.
If I could I would do it here
in the shower
where the tears would wash down
the drain with my flakes of skin
and shedded hair.

I cry when I am about to enter our building
unlocking the front door with its big square key.
In the elevator I tip my face in the corner
where she will never stand again.

I feel more kinship with wartorn parents
whose children have been killed than
my next door neighbor with her two living daughters.

As my tears fall I think of the millions of others
who have grieved over the one they loved deepest.
My tears are but a tiny drop in an ocean
of salt water.