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(for Caroline Ireland) They were to have been a love gift, but when she slit the paper funnel, they both saw they were fake; false flowers he'd picked in haste from the store's display, handmade coloured stuff, stiff as crinoline. Instantly she thought of women's hands cutting in grimy light by a sweatshop window; rough plank tables strewn with cut-out flower heads: lily, iris, primula, scentless chrysanthemums, pistils rigged on wire in crowns of sponge-tipped stamens, sepals and petals perfect, perfectly immune to menaces from the garden. Why so wrong, so...flattening? Why not instead symbols of unchanging love? Yet pretty enough, she considered, arranging them in a vase with dry grass and last summer's hydrangeas whose deadness was still (how to put it?) alive, or maybe the other side of life. Two sides, really, of the same thing? She laughed a little, such ideas were embarrassing even when kept to oneself, but her train of thought carried her in its private tunnel through supper, and at bedtime, brushing her teeth, she happened to look up at the moon. Its sunlit face was turned, as always, in her direction. The full moon, she couldn't help thinking, though we see only half of it. It was an insight she decided she could share with him, but when he joined her and together they lay in the dark, there seemed no reason to say anything. The words, in any case, would be wrong, would escape or disfigure her meaning. Good was the syllable she murmured to him, fading into sleep. And just for a split second, teetering on the verge of it, she believed everything that had to be was understood.

Those who have lived here since before time are gone while the ones who must replace them have not yet arrived. The streets are wet with a recent rain yet you continue to count first minutes and hours then trees rocks, windows, mailboxes, streetlights and pictographs refusing to rest even for the brief span it would take to dry off, change clothes and reemerge grotesque yet oddly attractive like Paganini whose mother was visited by a seraph in Genoa not long before his birth and who is thought now to have acquired much of his technical wizardry as a result of Marfan’s syndrome a quite common anomaly of the connective tissues which may well account for the tall and angular body, muscular underdevelopment as well as the hypermobile joints that eventuated on the stage in a peculiar stance, a spectacular bowing technique and an awesome mastery of the fingerboard. He would bring his left hip forward to support his body’s weight. His left shoulder, thrust forward also, would enable him to rest his left elbow on his chest, a buttress against the stress of forceful bowing along with debilitating muscle fatigue. The looseness of the right wrist and shoulder gave pliancy leading to broad acrobatic bowing. The ‘spider’ fingers of his left hand permitted a range on the fingerboard which many attributed to black magic for Paganini was said to have signed a pact with Lucifer to acquire virtuosity as a small child. After his death perhaps due in part to this tale in part also to rumours of gambling and wild debauchery the Church refused to allow him burial on hallowed ground. In consequence his body was moved furtively from place to place until after many years and for reasons still mysterious the Church finally relented. A few paradoxes should be noted as an afterward. Though accused of charlatanism he was rewarded for his skill like no one before him. He loved his violin above all yet once he gambled it away at cards. He accepted wealth and renown from his worshipping admirers but tripled the admission price to his concerts in the face of adverse reviews. While openly irreverent of tradition he still took a princess as his lover and let nations strike medals in his name.

we cut down 115th street for a quicker stroll past the pastor's house, vacant lot, liquor store. buses pointing out the hood & back. the route every morning goes by the liquor store. the loose Philly blunts and hard & dry. the sour mouth washed away by a dull gulp of liquor. store a honey bun in your fat back pocket. pray nobody notices your awkward walk. this liquor store sees stumbling often. out front the garish stickers fluoresce on the wire windows like winos with liquor store bottles. a small weapon sits behind the counter hidden by the cigarettes & candy small enough to steal. when the liquor store is locked up the rolling metals make the window a pastoral, part of our natural habitat. behold the liquor store: the sugar waters, the Ziploc bag of coins & Nate's tongue the color of loose pennies in the liquor store.

Fame is a fickle food Upon a shifting plate Whose table once a Guest but not The second time is set Whose crumbs the crows inspect And with ironic caw Flap past it to the Farmer’s corn Men eat of it and die

My master/father sent me up from South Carolina to Boston as a nine-year-old. My mother's illiterate silence has been a death. I wonder if she still labors in his fields. His sister, dutiful but cold as snow, gave me a little room in her house, below the stairs with the Irish servants, who hated me for the fatal flaw in my genealogy. For the first time in my life I am at home in this bevy of scholars, my first family. Here, the wallpapers welcome me into every room, and the mirrors see me, not my pedigree. My sisters, Jerusha, Emilia, Elizabeth ... But Mama's unlettered silence is a death.

When you swim in the surf off Seal Rocks, and your family Sits in the sand Eating potato salad, and the undertow Comes which takes you out away down To loss of breath loss of play and the power of play Holler, say Help, help, help. Hello, they will say, Come back here for some potato salad. It is then that a seventeen-year-old cub Cruising in a helicopter from Antigua, A jackstraw expert speaking only Swedish And remote from this area as a camel, says Look down there, there is somebody drowning. And it is you. You say, yes, yes, And he throws you a line. This is what is called the brotherhood of man.

I like old photographs of relatives in black and white, their faces set like stone. They knew this was serious business. My favorite album is the one that's filled with people none of us can even name. I find the recent ones more difficult. I wonder, now, if anyone remembers how fiercely I refused even to stand beside him for this picture — how I shrank back from his hand and found the other side. Forever now, for future family, we will be framed like this, although no one will wonder at the way we are arranged. No one will ever wonder, since we'll be forever smiling there — our mouths all teeth.

My mother the hard boned Chinese woman 23 years in this country without bothering to learn its language buys lean pork ribs special order at the Hop Sang in Chinatown and cooks dinner for an extended family of twenty-five during holidays. Seated loosely around the dining table trying to eat quietly I am scrubbed down to skin and bone, her oldest daughter— spineless, a headless snake a woman grandfather says who should have her tendons lifted out slowly by the steel point of a darning needle until she writhes. To my mother I'm useless but dangerous, capable of swallowing the family whole into my pelvis while I sit waiting for the boyfriend white and forbidden to touch our doorbell.

I lived a long time as both woman and girl it nearly killed me I don’t want an ordinary moment any longer no more gestures Such as the oaks neither shake nor fidget in observation And the objects worth discussing dissipate oh how they leak Away from the creeds claiming one can get ahead of the pain By naming see how the green will change you it really will I went into the green with a vine across my back and from the mud Came the pattern before the light could enter light turned And denied us, the moss struggled toward the yellow A fine pollen came up from the world and the road made this Shape in the powder: What’s wrong with right here? There’s a cape behind my eyes and the body inside it wallows Across patches of burned up grass untender and lines perpendicular To the gate I couldn’t open an outrage regularly loiters Isn’t that weird, how talent carries time? Nothing’s resolved today and the hours are dim but vital A body in a cloak upon a road rolling sweetly through the mind Place this road in some distant future just like that foregone past And then offensively remember how women don’t exist Get head of the pain the ages counsel, make plenty of money

The week in August you come home, adult, professional, aloof, we roast and carve the fatted calf —in our case home-grown pig, the chine garlicked and crisped, the applesauce hand-pressed. Hand-pressed the greengage wine. Nothing is cost-effective here. The peas, the beets, the lettuces hand sown, are raised to stand apart. The electric fence ticks like the slow heart of something we fed and bedded for a year, then killed with kindness’s one bullet and paid Jake Mott to do the butchering. In winter we lure the birds with suet, thaw lungs and kidneys for the cat. Darlings, it’s all a circle from the ring of wire that keeps the raccoons from the corn to the gouged pine table that we lounge around, distressed before any of you was born. Benign and dozy from our gluttonies, the candles down to stubs, defenses down, love leaking out unguarded the way juice dribbles from the fence when grounded by grass stalks or a forgotten hoe, how eloquent, how beautiful you seem! Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow, ballooning to overfill our space, the almost-parents of your parents now. So briefly having you back to measure us is harder than having let you go.