done it. Cops pulled the bodies out

bloody as births from the small, smoking

aperture of the door, laid them

on the hill, covered them with blankets that soaked

through. Blood

began to pour

down my legs into my slippers. I stood

where I was until they shot the bound

form into the black hole

of the ambulance and stood the other one

up, a bandage covering its head,

stained where the eyes had been.

The next morning I had to kneel

an hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,

rubbing with wet cloths at those dark

translucent spots, as one has to soak

a long time to deglaze the pan

when the feast is over.

Best Friends

(for Elizabeth Ewer, 1942–51)

The day my daughter turned ten, I thought of the

lank, glittering, greenish cap of your

gold hair. The last week of

your life, when I came each day after school,

I’d study the path to your front door,

the bricks laid close as your hairs. I’d try to

read the pattern, frowning down

for a sign.

The last day—there was not

a mark on that walk, not a stone out of place—

the nurses would not let me in.

We were nine. We had never mentioned death

or growing up. I had no more imagined

you dead

than you imagined me

a mother. But when I had a daughter

I named her for you, as if pulling you back

through a crack between the bricks.

She is ten now, Liddy.

She has outlived you, her dark hair gleaming like

the earth into which the path was pressed,

the path to you.

Absent One

(for Muriel Rukeyser)

People keep seeing you and telling me

how white you are, how thin you are.

I have not seen you for a year, but slowly you are

forming above my head, white as

petals, white as milk, the dark

narrow stems of your ankles and wrists,

until you are always with me, a flowering

branch suspended over my life.

Part Two

Poems for the Living

I. The Family

Possessed

(for my parents)

I have never left. Your bodies are before me

at all times, in the dark I see

the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns

wheeling over my bed, and the darkness

is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads

over my crib, your body-hairs

which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows,

one by one. And I never leave your sight,

I can look in the eyes of any stranger and

find you there, in the rich swimming

bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the

blue that reflects from the knife’s blade,

and I smell you always, the dead cigars and

Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming,

the slow stopped bear tread and the

quick fox, her nails on the ice,

and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the