Late August. The last dregs of summer pour out

in murky and tepid sunlight. It lingers briefly over

immiscible surfaces, glistening. Another year

ruined. You are missed by all the places you bruised

with your love and your leave-taking. Numbed, plumb

full of treachery I am pulled down and dawn

to dusk must drag the depths of memory

for stray remnants

or traces

of you. Everything once luminous now emerges

morbidly tumescent,

tear-logged

misshapen. Each time I resurface

my gradually unhinging

bones clink

clatter, rush forward to scoop up

anything I have retrieved

(scum shell salt silt)

wailing out with gratitude. This can’t be it,

this can’t be it, this can’t be it. I wring

my grief each time I weep.

Whet the heart with every blink and breath.

We found them after the tree trimmers

had loaded up their machines and gone—

two baby sparrows in the grass, tumbled 

like ripe fruit. We placed a shoebox on a heating 

pad, lined it with soft cloth, and watched them 

squeak and squirm, all purplish crepe skin, 

bulging eyes shut. Our mother promised us 

she’d feed them when it was time to go to school, 

sugar water squeezed from a tiny dropper 

into even tinier beaks. I picture her kneeling 

over the box every two hours, laboring to save

what could not possibly be saved. Twenty years 

later, her pale limbs swollen and still under a light

blue blanket, we too labor, squeezing water 

from pink sponges into her slack mouth, more 

of it dribbling out than in, love compelling us, 

as it does, through the motions of giving life, 

as though death had not already made its claim.

True that tenderness never stopped 

a bomb, got a man elected 

president, or netted billions 

in market shares. But when

my father stands in the wedge

between car and car door,

clutching the frame and trembling,

and my brother positions the wheelchair

behind him, grasps him under the arms,

guides him into the nylon seat

for the hundredth time as gently

and unhurried as the first,

I want to bow down.

two chickadees burn
a path through air

from the feeder suspended
on its frozen pole, cloaked

in shade, to bare twigs
of dogwood, doused

with sun.  back and forth.
taking turns. or is there

just one bird, tethered
to hunger?  plunging

each time into darkness
then winging back

to light where it cracks
and chews and prepares

for the next descent.

We skip through woods,

Scraped knees down a dirt path,

Play wedding with twisted twigs

For rings and altars of pine bark

Sticky with sap.

We play bride in little girl bodies

Between regatta and swimming,

The procession of the day laid out

In neat little hours, boxes checked,

Holding ghost hands.

We climb log fortresses and slide

Down zip lines through treetops

Until the bugs evening bite and

I wonder if the same mosquito

Tastes us three, does it make us

Sisters?

Most every night as a teenager:

my face lit by television,

dull and pastel glaze 

molting from the small screen.

Common comedy. Late-night

talk shows with scripted jubilance. 

Hard not to see these evenings 

as wasted, spent knelt at a vapid altar. 

When the shows melted into infomercials, 

I’d roll my unfinished body

in the shoal-dark. Some future I awaited

approached with the aching pace

of a spoon tunneling into a concrete cell wall,

its mystery as cold and illegible

as snowfall over ocean.