We treat the brain so that we can deal with

the mind, my indulgent

doctor tells me, as if I have sprained my ankle,

his legs crossed

showing bone-white shank wrapped in argyle,

a sinister Christmas

stocking. After each conversation I am allowed

to smoke and after

each smoke I return to the room and cry over

what I have done

and swear to my dead mother it is not her fault

and then the night returns

with its black scarf.

4

If I am lucky I have the moon’s mute worry to

imagine and pray to,

which is the same thing, and what frightens

me more than

her silence, or the tick and creak of such a large

building in the hours

when there are just three digits on the clock,

is how similar being here is to being dead. My life

has been abandoned

like a ship set ablaze and left to drift at sea,

where there is the time

you can see it float away, and then when it

is spied in the distance,

lost at latitude, then it falls from the

map altogether, and it’s as if it

were never there at all.

Maddy

Maddy

Then a swift left turn. Her nose

tilts to the breeze feathering

her hair, eyes closed in pleasure

or curiosity or rapture, I don’t know,

so much of what she does

remains a mystery, as I’m

sure we remain for her,

and she stands there pointing to

a new day, as she has four

thousand times before,

no diminishment or boredom,

as if this were the first breeze

she ever smelled, filled with

magic and dog weed and

bus fuel and fox crap, and

burglars, last night’s

laundry entering the

spin cycle, and she

stands there, poised in

arthritic grandeur, seven years

into her overbred, illness-plagued,

brief life, showing us

hope is routine, is hope.

28th Street

28th Street

All the years we lived behind

the florists, when I used to wake early

to stand by the window and watch

the men in red sweatshirts pushing

dollies of hydrangeas, tulips on pallets

from Holland, pale pink

ranunculus, crowds of yellow

hyacinths, a fury of color beneath

halogen lamps all before the hour

of six. The restaurant owners in

black leather jackets who came

before dawn were made to stand like

courtiers before this beauty, to

await its assembly while across

the street someone was usually pissing

with leisure in the car park.

Childhood in Emmaus

Childhood in Emmaus

Every night the walls

vibrated to the evening’s drag strip,

light-to-light races skimming the hills, and

big-block octaves poured down our

brain stems as the sun set. It was a small

Pennsylvania town full of cars on blocks,

jacked-up Novas and tricked-out Chevelles, asphalt lawns,

and redbrick ranches. A decent man

didn’t have clean hands. There had been

a mill once, and what innocence

remained sang its song, night by night.