No steps remained, but we did not leap
from the knee-high grass of that house
abandoned in the woods to the porch

with the planks that were as loose and warped
as those of a small boat beached long ago
by someone who rowed one last time

from a lake in a kind of reverse drowning,
the kind that calls one permanently to land
when someone has been lost, the water opening

indifferently and closing in the same manner
until even the oar strokes were traceless,
the boat left to become more and more

vaguely like the ribs of something that lived once,
that had purpose, but now could not hold a body,
could cradle nothing except the occasional rain

and wind the way the body cradles breath—
the warped, narrow wood of the porch
reached beyond us, me and the daughter of a man

who had been like me, who had been young
when this house was new and warmed by people
we would not ever know except by way of a black sock

someone had used to wipe away shit or semen
and left in the corner before going out again
to the porch and yard to sink

into the will of whatever else makes up the woods.
Seeing the sock then told me some of the possible history
of the world around us: that others had come here,

probably the girl’s older brother had been hiding here
while their father knocked at almost every door
in our neighborhood looking for him one night,

and maybe the cool somber-jawed dropouts
had been here, and other couples
who could not afford hotels,

others had left crushed and uncrushed cans
and clouded bottles, stick porn and mottoes
and aliases on the walls; they’d left their smell there too

and the roof seemed to want to guard it
though when the windows were smashed,
the doors kicked open, some of their musk

had been swept into the woods where it met the two of us
approaching with nothing but our caution
and green irrevocable hunger, and we could see it

would not hold us, the old porch,
so we did not leap from the knee high grass
to get in, we stepped as lightly as others had crossing

planks that splintered and cried out
as if to the old house and maybe to the deep, deep woods
and to the path others had not intended to leave.

THE WHALE

THE WHALE

for Purvis

Just like that your father’s dead,
Half of all the footsteps you’ve made

In your lifetime swept away by the tide
Gnawing the shore, the bits of shells
Like fragments of bone and teeth sinking

Into the sand beneath you as you walk
Toward the people crowding the body

Of a young whale, a boy on the shoulders
Of his father, a woman slipping film into a camera,
The skin peeling on a lifeguard’s neck

As he stoops peering into the animal’s eye,
Saying nothing, the audience silent or silenced