Haven’t I slogged through enough regrets? Aren’t my hooves
mud-caked and heavy? I used to think things like
How could anyone . . . ? and then I found out.
What makes up a life?
My father escaped the pogroms in Russia
on the shoulders of his mother and an older brother.
Hiding in the forest by day, they trudged through snow at night.
My father. Who stood hunched behind the counter
of Hy-Grade Wines & Liquors, who parted
his hair in the middle and left a grease stain on the couch.
Who loved watermelon.
Now I’m so much older than he lived to be.
Last week I couldn’t remember Stevie Wonder’s name.
I could see his big, beautiful head swaying.
But it took me all day to haul his name up, hand over hand,
from the murky well. That same night
I forgot Hemingway’s first name.
Now I go around saying, Ernest Hemingway, Stevie Wonder.
Ernest Hemingway, Stevie Wonder.
And why then can I still recall
my legions of failures. Lashing out at my child
when I thought I’d lost her in a strange city.
The newborn possums I smashed
with a shovel in the garden shed.
And Celia who came to my door the night
she had nowhere to go. Yes,
there were circumstances, but
I didn’t take her in. And everyone
I’ve lost or abandoned. What if
I didn’t keep shuffling through the litter
of my sins and lamentations.
Tonight when I go out to lock up the chickens
the orange dahlias glow, each petal
tender and suffused with the last light of day.
Beauty. That’s an old story too.
I may never get to Paris again, but once I heard
Ghislaine Roux sing “Ave Maria” at Sainte-Chapelle.
Sun streamed through the dazzling stained glass.
I was so close I could see the fine mist of sweat on her throat.
I was washed in a river of splendor.
And yet I’ve been so unhappy.
I’ve thrown down a towel to soften the tile
on the bathroom floor, lain there and cried, I can’t bear it. I
can’t bear it.
And then another voice said, not without pity,
Of course you can.
And I rinsed my face, opened the door,
and smiled at the child coloring at the table.
Have I had a good life? Once after sex
while I lay heavy on the body of my beloved,
for a second, two seconds, I could feel it—
good and bad collapsing
like a wave breaking into the sea.
And then the next second I thought about it
and it was the aboutness again.
The baby keeps saying, I can’t remember.
At two, is she already forgetting everything
she knew before she was born?
Yesterday, she put a piece of paper
the size of her thumbnail into a toy mailbox.
Then she took it out and read the letter to me.
Dear Nana. I love you in the morning.
Then she put it back in the box.
Do you want to hear it again? she asked.