DRAWING ME   

My daughter is deep in concentration, quietly engaged

in activity at her miniature table sprawled with crayons,

a palette of watercolors, and a large drawing pad.

Poised above, I look down upon her squiggles of lines

portraying a cockeyed house surrounded by broccoli trees.

“This is our house. That’s me. And that’s you, daddy.”

She points to a figure with an oval head, gray hair outcrops,

and stick fingers clasping smaller ones of her own depiction

like a child’s rendering of Michelangelo’s Creation of Man.

I am pleased with my little creation’s devotion to me,

her giver of comfort, her giver of punishment,

an omniscient entity amused with her ruminations,

her making sense of the universe through art –

or has she invented me, a two dimensional Jehovah

beneath the yellow swirl of sun and coiled heaven

who could never exist independent of her imagination.

UNABLE TO SLEEP, I CLEAN THE HOUSE IN MY MIND  

Lying here in a patch of moonlight,

eyes closing, eyes opening,

the bed has become my enemy

and will not give me solace

from the torment of the night’s silence.

Last time I tried to count the pairs

on Noah’s manifest

making their way up the plank

between drops of rain

and laughter of the dammed.

Tonight I am cleaning the house,

sweeping away yesterday’s sand,

dusting rows of molding books,

their spines cracked and covers torn,

their iniquities concealed.

I tenderly place the china

into the sink’s warm bath.

As the suds graze the chips

and seep in between the fissures,

I can hear indistinct cries –

the echo of an argument,

its anger like a print

fired into the porcelain – 

or perhaps the soap has stung a wound

inflicted by rushed packing. 

I will then take my furniture oil

and polish the cherry wood,

the oak, the mahogany,

caressing the dark surfaces

like a hand over a lover’s back.

The arc of my face pressed close

to the breath of sweet lemon,

I will whisper into the small gashes

a soothing lullaby,

a song of forgiveness.

AN ABSENT LIFE 

The strands of past and future tied in one

Tough, weather-beaten, salted twist of hemp,

The present – Then

I shall be able to refind myself,

And also, you.

                                                                                         -Anne Morrow Lindbergh

What if things happened differently on that cold spring morning

in 1932, the year your parents fell to pieces  

and the world stood still when you vanished?

What if there were more angels than insects

surrounding you that night as you slept deep in the woods

just four miles away from your toys and teddy bear?

What if, like in the stories of children’s books,

you were retrieved and nursed by a kind animal,

or perhaps discovered by an elderly couple

who lived alone, never bothered with newspapers,

never knew your father was the first to fly

across the dark eternity of the Atlantic?

And they raised you, gave you a new name,

fed you full of vegetables, potatoes, and pork,

taught you how to read and write and do math in your head.

Some years later you went to Princeton on a scholarship

studied law, listened to jazz, and met a women

who loved to run her hands through your thick curly hair.

You married her and bought a six bedroom house,

filled it with children, all with thick curly hair,

and they played with their mother while you worked at the office.

When the children grew up and went off to college,

you spent more time working in your garden

and traveled abroad to Paris and Venice.

You lived a full life, now at seventy-three,

yet there were always those disquieting feelings,

that hollow sound your footfalls made upon the earth,

and those strange unexplained impulses

every time you hear propellers overhead

that had you standing outside in the backyard,

your watery eyes searching the blue air for planes,

infant passengers on their way towards the Atlantic,

while you rub the back of your neck with your absent hands.

SNOW

I have been staring at this blank sheet of paper all day

and have become snow blind by its emptiness.

There is so much I could write – so much history –

yet this glaring white paper reminds me

I have forgotten everything

and how much there is I do not know.

So I begin by shoveling away the snow,

and underneath emerge the black specks of these words,

and underneath the words are the wasted leaves

of fallen days I had raked up into piles

before a blizzard buried them in its blanket.

I pause and glance up at the moon,

a transparent wafer dissolving into dawn,

as another slab of white slides off the rooftop –

perhaps the names of a few friends –

calving away from the glacier of memory

and the bare tree branches bend and clack in laughter.

But there is something about all this white – its wholeness –

that makes me think this is how I would like it to end –

with me curled up under these twenty-one lines,

frozen in this poem, in this age of ice.