they didn’t dislike me. What if you thought

your dolls disliked you, that would be mental

illness,” I say. “That would be awful,”

Bianca says. “The woodchuck could say

whether it’s like his long sleep,

as I describe its coming on.”

We walk back up into the hot particulate

air of the past. Don’t be sad,

I want to say to Bianca, you are

learning “After Apple-Picking”

with Ben, you are singing with him, the lonesome

hibernation time is gone,

the time of death in life is gone,

the air of day is yours to keep

for scores and scores of years, day

for the light, night for just some human sleep.

5 o’Clockface

When I open my eyes, there’s the eastern inner

border of my home state,

the hands greenish with creamy granular

phosphorescence, and the hinge of the angle

the lake of my childhood: purple under

thunderheads; chartreuse; silver;

in sunlight the fierce turquoise of

my mother’s eyes. The luminous paint has

glowed for weeks—how long since it was touched by the

light it holds. Then the furnace goes on,

like a wind in my head, an underground wind.

In my dream, my slender son was pesky—

my only dream with harshness toward him in it—

getting in my way when I wanted to work,

and I barked at him, annoyed, and lifted his

wrists over his head, the ends of his tibia and

ulna like chicken wing joints between my fingers,

and I steered him down the hall by this human boy handle

and deposited him in his room, my young

son. My first 60 years,

in my sleep I hurried not to be late

for my execution,

but since I walked away from my gorgeous

bully boyfriend, in the dark I wrangle

with people—not yet speaking truth

to power, but acting on annoyance, this time

to a tender one.

How much longer can I live without touch?

It’s a sweet sentence, that at 75

“I’m between boyfriends,”

and maybe in a way I’m like a crone goddess, ish,

the Sun-Kissed Matron in gray braids,

holding my tray out to you, chest-

high, rich with night-dark California raisins.

Improv

On the morning of the drive from sea-level

to the mountain, I asked if we could stop for melted

cheese! at the Mexican place in Truckee.

Then I worried, does Bob think I’m a diva?

Am I always asking for things? And I thought of Toi’s letter,

and I know she is the locus of a gift—

and I am too, a spiral of energy, a genie, a dust-devil,

I was born with it, a life force,

it does not belong to me, or to anyone else,

I’m the container of it, the guardian.

And I love to let it out toward people—

nectary nosegay gusts of it.

My mother would ask me to rub her back,

she said that I had Vivian Hands,

like her college best friend’s—

the palms of my hands would listen for what