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We brought that newborn home from Maimonides and showed her nine blue glittering streets. Would she like the semis with hoods of snow? The precinct? Bohack’s? A lit diner? Her eyes were huge and her gaze tilted like milk in a pan, toward shadow. Would she like the tenement, three dim flights, her crib that smelled of Lemon Pledge? We slept beside her in our long coats, rigid with fatigue in the unmade bed. Her breath woke us with its slight catch. Would she approve of gray winter dawn? We showed her daylight in our cupped hands. Then the high clocks began booming in this city and the next, we counted for her, but just the strokes, not the laggards or the tinny echoes, and we taught her how to wait, how to watch, how to be held, in that icy room, until our own alarm chimed.

What I wanted seemed little enough at the time. There was snow on the ground, grayish and sticking to the mud—the promise of plenty to come. Snow gathered already in the corners of sills. When she spoke what we had sensed for weeks without saying, her voice fell clear, unwavering, soft as the day. It hardly had to do with us anymore. The crazy tilt of the carport across the alley was all I could see for awhile, the weight on its wobbly roof like a terrible joke. But that was wrong—that was wrong. Before long the snows shook down on what we had done. What I wanted was to ignore it all, sit there in stillness, shepherding logs to the fire while the old ones went pink to white to gray.

I like to touch your tattoos in complete darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of where they are, know by heart the neat lines of lightning pulsing just above your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you to me, taking you until we’re spent and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists or turns to pain between us, they will still be there. Such permanence is terrifying. So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

In every dream of a room the first room intrudes. No matter the years, the tears dried and forgotten, it is the skeleton of the first that protrudes.

A minor brush with medicine in eighty years was all he’d known. But this was different. His right arm limp and slung, his right leg dead to feeling and response, he let me spoon him chicken-broth. Later he said without self-pity that he’d like to die. I bluffed, “The doctors think that therapy might help you walk again.” “They’re liars, all of them,” he muttered. Bedfast was never how he hoped to go. “In bed you think of everything,” he whispered with a shrug, “you think of all your life.” I knew he meant my mother. Without her he was never what he might have been, and everyone who knew him knew it. Nothing could take her place— not the cars he loved to drive, not the money he could earn at will, not the roads he knew by heart from Florida to Saranac, not the two replacement wives who never measured up. Fed now by family or strangers, carried to the john, shaved and changed by hired help, this independent man turned silent at the end. Only my wife could reach him for his private needs. What no one else could do for him, he let her do. She talked to him and held his hand, the left. She helped him bless himself and prayed beside him as my mother might have done. “Darling” was his final word for her. Softly, in Arabic.

Fifty-nine days to go. I can't find my purple beach towel. I can't even get to my closet without walking across a sea of dirty socks. Mom pokes her head into my doorway, says: “Time to clean your room, Sophie.” And I have to admit she's right. And it's not that cleaning my room is the worst thing to do. It's just that there are so many other better things to do, like— painting my toenails Strawberry Pink, eating a huge stack of Uncle Joe's pancakes, dreaming of riding the Ferris wheel, thinking up a story to tell around the campfire on Scary Story Night, painting shells, riding waves . . . all the fun, wonderful, sandy, sunny things we do at Summerhouse Time.

for Alan This, then, is the gift the world has given me (you have given me) softly the snow cupped in hollows lying on the surface of the pond matching my long white candles which stand at the window which will burn at dusk while the snow fills up our valley this hollow no friend will wander down no one arriving brown from Mexico from the sunfields of California, bearing pot they are scattered now, dead or silent or blasted to madness by the howling brightness of our once common vision and this gift of yours— white silence filling the contours of my life.

What I notice first within this rough scene fixed in memory is the rare quality of its lightning, as if those bolts were clipped from a comic book, pasted on low cloud, or fashioned with cardboard, daubed with gilt then hung overhead on wire and fine hooks. What I hear most clearly within that thunder now is its grief—a moan, a long lament echoing, an ache. And the rain? Raucous enough, pounding, but oddly musical, and, well, eager to entertain, solicitous. No storm since has been framed with such matter-of-fact artifice, nor to such comic effect. No, the thousand-plus storms since then have turned increasingly artless, arbitrary, bearing—every one of them—a numbing burst. And today, from the west a gust and a filling pressure pulsing in the throat—offering little or nothing to make light of.

When she comes back, from college, I will see the skin of her upper arms, cool, matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old soupy chest against her breasts, I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment, her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a soul in a body. She came into my life the second great arrival, after him, fresh from the other world—which lay, from within him, within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep, week after week, the moon rising, and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months, in a slow blur, around our planet. Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk, and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult to have her in that room again, behind that door! As a child, I caught bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds, looked into their wild faces, listened to them sing, then tossed them back into the air—I remember the moment the arc of my toss swerved, and they entered the corrected curve of their departure.

You look like a monster, one woman said to another. The woman was on fire. This is the first of two screws twisted into a wall. One bus is sent on its route minutes before the other. This is the first. Thousands of soldiers were lowering their faces to the grass, as though an exercise can will an effect. People made their way to the hospital: a doctor would look at them, and then they could die. You can dip a line of monofilament into a river. You can do it twice. The first becomes a second. The second becomes a third. Three girls stretched out their arms while the wind sheared their flesh. Sheared, not seared, what was left. I could have shown you a swimming pool lit with turquoise light. It was early. It was a mission. It wasn’t the first.