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Not long after you had told me, gently, that you still grieved for your last love, though that had ended almost a year before, and that you could have no intimate relationship with me, maybe not with anyone for a time, I stopped my fork in the air with whatever hung on the end of it that I was eating. My throat wouldn't swallow. I felt weak and sick, as if it were myself that I devoured, piece by piece, as you talked away the hopes that I had put in your lovely face. It was the old story coming true for me once more, though you were hardly mine. . . . When we finished I walked you back to your car; I don't remember having much to say. Why would I? Buildings drifted by, and cars, and faces. Then we arrived at the place where, afterwards, I would never see you again, at a parking lot near Times Square. There I marked the sidewalk with X's visible only to me: "At this place I was lost again," they'd say to me when I walked there in the future. "Dig here and find what's left of me, or what I left behind, where X marks the spot." I felt like the death's-head and crossed bones that surmount the treasure chest. I only felt a little like gold coins and jewels. I have signed the City with these sphinxes —in parks, in streets, in bedrooms, in my own apartments. And there we stood, you and I, hemmed in by the stitches of X's that could not hold you to me. But X's mean kisses, I realized, as well as what is lost: all the kisses I couldn't give you chalked like symbols on the sidewalk. After all, you yourself had been marked by loss, even in your laughter that afternoon at the show I had taken you to. Bright-eyed and smiling in the seat beside me, you stole my glances with your dark, dark eyes and your long hair. I thought that I had not been this happy in a long time with a woman and was ready to become even more happy, ready to do anything that you wanted in order to please you, to see that smile come up, not knowing what you were soon to say to me as we dined. And when you spoke, I felt life fall away from me. Again I felt that I would never be happy. I felt the words that I had wanted to say to you leaving me, rushing out of my chest like dead air, until I had no more words to say. I seemed to cut and swallow my food as if it were me myself that stuck in pieces on the end of the fork I had raised to my mouth. Had I been chewing on my own flesh? Self-Pity the Devourer took me by the hand that held the fork, and once again I feasted on all that was dark and hopeless in myself, in lieu of all that was beautiful, desirable, and unattainable in you. And then I stood beside you in the lot where you had parked your car, with the X's buzzing in the air, sticking themselves to you and me and the blacktop and the cars. When you reached out to embrace me, I moved to embrace you in return—and then came the part that I don't want to remember, the part I hate: I caught a glimpse of your face as we put our arms around each other, and your face said everything to me about how you had wasted the afternoon, how eager you were to speed away in your car, a mixture of disgust and relief that the thing would soon be over, that I would be crossed out forever from your life—and everything that I hated about myself, my stupid chin, my ugly nose, my hopeless balded head, my stuck-out ears, my wreck of a heart, crashed over me, spinning me into the vortex of a palpable self-hate that I have only ever let myself feel a little bit at a time, though it is always there

he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing. southern trees as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees. fuchsia, lavender, white, light pink, purple : crape myrtle bouquets burst open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bark : my favorite southern trees. one hundred degrees in the shade: we settle into still pools of humidity, moss- dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees. the maples in our front yard flew in spring on helicopter wings. in fall, we splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees. frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees. i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i : it’s part of what makes me evie :  i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

Glove box rummages itself & dumps: fuzzy cough droppings & stuck (menthol) among them a misdirectional map intrigues me: say clotheslines’ fripperies hopping the breeze off the alley & garbage lids clanging downhill to the sea: say there in the sea floes of penguins bobbing up to Argentine flamingos. How hard is it to get lost? Listen to lost useless horses whingeing for home & hames, a lost grail stuffed with dirt deaf to human legends long unstrung of sacred tune & lost, children prodded along in the loops of war, hopscotch mistake, the cast stone skipped off the lake instead & lost the tournament to the nice policeman there with the ice cream precinct & his body buddy Dad. Dad declares he knows by the spit & stripe of her this’s no one of his own, his kids mope,& he goes. Ear to ear I must look lucky at last, librarian at the dictionary of things looking-up ever since I hid in the glove box, pretending to be directions.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey And short the season, first rubythroat in the fading lilacs, alyssum in bloom, a honeybee bumbling in the bleeding heart on my gelding’s grave while beetles swarm him underground. Wet feet, wet cuffs, little flecks of buttercup on my sneaker toes, bluets, violets crowding out the tufts of rich new grass the horses nose and nibble like sleepwalkers held fast— brittle beauty—might this be the last?

Whether anger quickens a lagging stride, and periodic burn-offs in the forest revitalize exhausted soil and flora—. Whether we should take pleasure in the wildcat jubilation of a lightning bolt that whips its silver vein of genesis through the night sky, flash-photo of a white birch upended, the root-system buckled to swollen thunderheads—. And whether naming an offense amounts to sour grapes and common bitterness, or even the conceited nonsense of unwashed yahoo multitudes, a yawping insult to civilized behavior—. Whether a July rainstorm, even when it drenches the unprepared pedestrian and befuddles traffic, might be extravagant, a joy, like the whoops and escalating bop glissandos of Gillespie’s upraised horn, cascading pitches a countersong to meteoric chalk marks Perseids burn across the House of Leo—. And whether peaceful ecstasy might float up from a fifteen-second avalanche reflected in the skier’s goggles, his jacket a spark of scarlet on the topmost slope, waiting for the homeward track to clear.

The rain is haunted; I had forgotten. My children are two hours abed And yet I rise Hearing behind the typing of the rain, Its abacus and digits, A voice calling me again, Softer, clearer. The kids lie buried under duvets, sound Asleep. It isn’t them I hear, it’s Something formless that fidgets Beyond the window’s benighted mirror, Where a negative develops, where reflection Holds up a glass of spirits. White noise Precipitates. Rain is a kind of recollection. Much has been shed, Hissing indignantly into the ground. It is the listening Belates, Haunted by these fingertaps and sighs Behind the beaded-curtain glistening, As though by choices that we didn’t make and never wanted, As though by the dead and misbegotten.

What hand opened the door, I don't know. No one lives there in winter. And I don't know if it was for entrance or for exit that the place opened itself, or was opened, though I do know what boundaries were broken. The lake lay frozen, the sky still as folded wings. And everywhere snow blown into the rooms, strewn across the braided rugs and knotty boards, under chairs, creeping like a slow cold tide, white and silent, out of its element with greed. Then I remembered the photograph, black and white, as old as me or older. What eye watched that scene, taking it in, shameless, I don't know, though I do know that boundaries were broken: A woman, her grey dress blowing toward land, lost on the shore in the dim light of her long day's end, and a man, farther up the beach, alone. The sea— mute, infinite entity—taking in its borders hungrily; and the stolen child it drank up when each entered the other in a moment of dropped vigilance. In this kind of world no blueprint instructs us how to house what we love against the winds of loss. The woman, the man, their child gone—slipped from the safe home of their love, swallowed whole. I am not going to try to feel what that woman felt, or to speak with her voice. I don't know what she did next or how she did what she did next. She is the mother, my fear, all the love ever lost to grief. Her pain is an ocean vaster than planets, a diaspora of longing flung to all four flogging winds. In her life, I am sure that time drifted past her, with her, within her. I know that that summer, like all summers, moved on through the fall into winter, that the shore closed up, abandoned, cold. And that the thing lost still blows through us, the swollen door no longer shuts.

In a vintage boutique on Sullivan’s Quay, I lift a winter coat with narrow bodice, neat lapels, a fallen hem. It is far too expensive for me, but the handwritten label [1915] brings it to my chest in armfuls of red. In that year, someone drew a blade through a bolt of fabric and stitched this coat into being. I carry it to the dressing room, slip my arms in. Silk lining spills against my skin. I clasp the belt and draw a slow breath as a cramp curls again, where blood stirs and melts. In glass, I am wrapped in the weight of old red: red pinched into girl cheeks and smeared from torn knees, lipstick blotted on tissue, bitten lips, a rough kiss, all the red bled into pads and rags, the weight of red, the wait for red, that we share. In the mirror, the old coat blushes. This pocket may once have sheltered something precious — a necklace, a love letter, or a fresh egg, feather-warm, its shell brittle around a hidden inner glow, held loosely so it couldn’t crack, couldn’t leak through seams, so it couldn’t stain the dress within.

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. Daffodil bulbs instead of balls Stared from the sockets of the eyes! He knew that thought clings round dead limbs Tightening its lusts and luxuries. Donne, I suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense, To seize and clutch and penetrate; Expert beyond experience, He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone. .  .  .  .  .

You could whistle me home from anywhere in the neighborhood; avenues away, I’d pick out your clear, alternating pair of notes, the signal to quit my child’s play and run back to our house for supper, or a Saturday trip to the hardware store. Unthrottled, wavering in the upper reaches, your trilled summons traveled farther than our few blocks. I’ve learned too, how your heart’s radius extends, though its beat has stopped. Still, some days a sudden fear darts through me, whether it’s my own city street I hurry across, or at a corner in an unknown town: the high, vacant air arrests me—where’s home?