I. Summer
Walking across a golf course at night,
I stop to pick up a tee, a thin white funnel
planted in the grass. Or perhaps
the smallest ear trumpet ever made,
I can hear the nervous laughter
of teenagers drinking on the seventh green,
and I can hear the silence ten years ago,
when I stumbled onto a couple making love
in the cupped hand
of a sandtrap. Please don’t step on my glasses
was all the girl said
as I hurried past their crumpled clothes.
From this slight rise,
I can see the moonlit arcs of the sprinklers
as they sputter around on a flat stretch of greens,
then collapse at the tap of a timer.
The vista from a boat
stranded in a reflecting pool,
the silent, planar emptiness
of a man-made lake.
Faint window lights on the shore,
a thin line of trees
that I keep moving toward, walking on water,
whispering apologies into my hand.
II. Fall on Prospect Street
A flattened paper bag
among the leaves in the gutter.
The road is held together
by seams of tar.
Children at play,
silhouettes on yellow.
The cars move so slowly
you could walk with them.
Mrs. Anderson comes out
to light her Jack-O-Lantern,
her wrap-around porch
like an empty stage.
She’s told me thirty times
I look like her son.
We wave across our yards,
leaves falling between us.
Drag another tarpful
to the curb, Mr. Finke,
a long shadow
chasing your footsteps.
III. Christmas Eve
Snow falling at a hard slant,
the sidewalks lined with candlelit
paper bags. Soft light
like a flashlight under a bedsheet,
the muffled drone
of the pastor’s sermon
behind the closed doors
of the First Presbyterian Church.
Houses roughly sketched
in lights, thin branches
of dogwoods and elms
strung in Rorschach patterns.
Down by Worthington Street,
a bag catches fire,
burns away in a few seconds
leaving just the candle,
which somehow keeps burning
against the falling snow.
I imagine my parents
wrapping presents
after I drifted to sleep
fifteen years ago,—
bayberry candles, the tinkling
of Christmas ornaments
as the dog laps
the green preserving water.
The breath hanging
inside each glass ball
is still the same sealed breath
as the year I was born.
And now the church lets out,
the street filling
with the organ’s steady voice,
the quiet conversations
of people finding their cars
covered with snow.
IV. Spring
Inside your body,
someone is squeezing
the soundless accordion of your lungs.
Sunlight enters the room
through the ribs of the venetian blinds.
Cars splash last night’s rainwater
beneath the window.
Your lips part as if
to say something, then close again.
The striped square of sunlight
sits at the end of the bed
like a child we haven’t had,
escaping to our room
from her nightmares. Slowly,
she moves into the space between us,
then climbs the wall,
spreading as she dissolves.
I whisper in your ear
Time to wake up, time to wake up,
as the paper boy chucks his bundle of headlines
with a thud onto the doorstep.