1964

the morning after my high school graduation

a moving van pulls up out front

of our New Jersey house

                                             United! it proclaims

& while movers maneuver

the contents of our house down the walk

up the ramp into the dark tunnel

                                                         stacked with blankets

                                                         strung with belts

& while my mother supervises

the know-it-all yes’m no’m blue-jumpsuited crew

I assemble a collection

of what I might need for the rest of my life

                                                                           I’m seventeen

& I’m not moving to DC though she thinks I am

no, today is I win (& lose), game over

get out, get out for good

drive away in my two-door pale-blue Pontiac

                                                                               dressed in black

& strung with pearls, it takes her

six weeks to find me cleaning a toilet in a stranger’s house

no, I won’t come with you, won’t pretend

you have any hold over me, won’t endure

one more day of your husband’s (my father’s) 

drug- & drink-addled rage

                                             she drives off

I pass another night deep in the park, locked in my car

End Game

yes, we too suffer while we

watch & tend to the old & ill

tend them when they know

& we know it’s end game

they tremble, dribble, moan

embarrass & soil themselves

still, we don’t deliver the dose

are we making them pay

for what they’ve done to us?

only nature or some kinder god

grants them their release

later we advertise how long

we forced them to endure

Paradiso Anagrams to Diaspora

I am in paradise

not banished but instead

where I would most wish to be

because of fragments

I live outside the outer world

inside my own world

though I don’t knit

I’m knitting . . . long ago I wove

my body my loom

Silk

the sussuration of S

iffiness of a short I

strength & resilience of an L

scissor snip of a K

silk blouses always

pretending to slide off my shoulders

silk blouses & trousers

I gave away

when I threw off the salaryman slog

& moved to Hawaii

off grid, forty acres of rainforest

rain, mud, feral pigs

rooting outside my windows

the four-thousand meters of silk

inside every silk moth cocoon

What It's Like to Fall @ 77 Years Old

I am hallucinating the out of doors

because I am inside until further notice

every window in my house brings me

light, bare trees, snow on the ground

indoors is this ugly aluminum walker

in my lap a book about taking the walks

Henry David Thoreau took . . . Cape Cod

Mt Katahdin, Mt Wachusett . . . nearly

two centuries ago people truly walked

New England out of doors was country

from here to there & yet a farther there

as far as one might walk in a day, a week

a month . . . one day I might be back up

on both of my feet & out of doors

US Public High School, 2025

she tells me about a boy who comes to school

filthy — clothes, skin, hair — I mean filthy, she says

I wonder, does he never wash? has he no shower?

no parents? no home? what brings him to school

every day? he’s one of six students in her

“intervention” group, students who are behind

who do not learn, who cannot, she says, learn

the parts of speech, though all of them can speak

they know how to assemble verb, noun, adjective

so in fact they know parts of speech as a dog

knows a hydrant, a cat, its owner, without

giving names to any of them — a dirty silent

boy, who agrees to sit at the group table the day

another boy, the one who misbehaves, is absent

Air

each Palestinian child killed

is someone I will never know

& though you might say

I wouldn’t know them anyway

because before they’d have grown up

I’ll be dead, still, we might have exchanged

fleeting bursts of air, theirs

blown here from Rafah in Gaza, mine

flown there from Salisbury in Vermont

world travelers, sibling orphans

they bombed into fragments

or found frozen in rain-soaked tents

I shriveled inside worn garments

we who die in our killing times

Pronouns

Ovid’s creation story is so predictably male —

natus homo est — I expect Ovid saw homo

as a white Roman male, a norm from which

other colors & genders deviate. A priori,

I reject homo & translate Ovid’s phrase as

humans are born, not being snootish enough

to opt for humanity is born, also not quite yet

determined to feminize Ovid, nudge him

toward woman is born — problematic, since

my preferred future is a gender-irrelevant

world where woman is as impertinent as man.

Wintering Over

November days I scour the woods

for windfall, blowdown . . . young trees

the high winds tore or toppled, old trunks

not yet rotted into fresh earth, uprooted

white pine, its bark gone, pale dry limbs

I snap off, drag & carry, align & pack down

twigs & limbs & trunks all rise into great

piles — over-winter dens for skunks & voles

weasels, rabbits, & mice . . . a snow-clad

mound mimes an igloo — now picture

feasts, song & dance, the partnering off

plumping wombs, young in fur-lined nests

such imaginings might be, or might not

possibly my brush piles simply rot

Black Swamp Gooseberry

I grasp the thorny-stalked, lobe-leafed

plants near their base & yank up

the roots, shallow & widely branched

they leap from the soil, a wad of tangle

no flowers, no fruit, too many thorns

sheath all but the oldest stalks, thorns

eager to snag my skin when I walk

the woods, so I weed them out, as if

I deserve to shape the woods, decide

which plants live, which plants die

which fallen limbs must be tossed

onto piles, which young trees lopped

the woods observe me, endure me

someday soon they know I’ll be gone