both. I slept with that doll—though her plastic

feet and hands were painful, and her parched

net skirt scratched—until my mother

moved, and my box of things was lost,

like my darling, I had not even been there when she vanished.

Her Brother

I don’t think I wanted to “marry him

when I grew up,” her elder brother,

I don’t think I wanted to marry—I was like

an archery bow of Diana, only

very slightly curved.

I was 9. I don’t remember her dwindling

and goldening, but when I looked up their address,

on the net, I knew the window of her bedroom,

facing east—right turn and up

the stairs, right turn and through her door,

each day after school—her parents’ and brother’s rooms

facing the Bay. The house looked

like a cake, made in a royal bakery

in Paris France, the curved-scale

tiles of the roof like ripples of frosting

squeezed out of the bag with an X

like a cross at the tip of the nozzle. O my darling,

you were 9. How long did it take you to die,

after glazing that Xmas tree silver

with lead paint? Longer than your mother.

I think you curled up, more and more,

dearest soldier.

In the archives, I found your story in the upper

corner of a newspaper for

1953, the amount

a judge awarded your father in yule

death. I was looking for news of your brother—I had

never thought of marrying him till I was

78, he’d be 82

or so—but I found he’d been murdered years

later, in his car outside his home.

I had wanted to lie in his room, with him,

skin to skin within sight of the ancient

fresh sun in ridges of western

wind on the water leading out

to the sea, and in, and out. I never got to

hold her, or even to think, Whithersoever

thou goest, there I will be with thee also.

Confessional (for S.B.)

I have been wondering if I am a bully.

I like it when people listen to me.

I love it when animals do.

The night in Washington Square Park,

that long conversation with a mockingbird.

I was not craving attention,

I longed to be accepted as a fellow creature.

When her slayer was digging her grave,

our classmate might have still been in his car,

or lying on the ground like someone asleep in the woods,

on the slope of the coastal hills—fog, salt,

cold air coming out of the mouth of a cave.

The dirt floor of his basement took in her training bra.

He had offered her a ride, she was alone, she was no longer a

child, almost a young woman.

Where was his soul, he had lost it like an overcoat

dropped in a crowd running through an earthquake.

He drove her over the Hayward Fault,

its boundaries jammed together like an overjaw clenched to an

underjaw.

When she had not come home to her mother and father and sister