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We take our last walk. Walls stripped of portraits, warped mirrors, dressing tables, and the grandfather clock with its stoic face and elaborate gentle fingers. For years we struggled to break free of the closeness of rooms, the obligation of birth order, the metaphysics that bind one element to the other, as if we were still wild girls playing wild rover in the garden, breaking through a chain of linked hands.

I’m terrified of a number of fates, Poisoned water under a tyrant’s wage, Being fired for doing nothing, my parents dying, Committing a thought like this to the page, The splash of acid to the face The Queens non-profit boss received Leaving work one blue August evening. Hell’s So eloquent and poetry’s no fate at all Unless you count the story of the divided sea Waiting to wash its assassins away. Says the Pharaoh, “That’s so sad.” But that story is less fate than news, whereas That Queens boss? Permanently burned, the Times Says one eye won’t stop weeping.

Lulled in a nook of North West Bay, The water swells against the sand, Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass, In which clear surface, just a little way From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass With languid ease, apparently unmanned, Adrift along the day, Imagining a breeze to fan Their motion, though there's none. Siobhan Reaches a giant hand down from the sky And nudges with insouciant élan The nearest hull, her bended waist mast-high. That hand is just as magically withdrawn. So moves the catamaran. And through the Lilliputian fleet She, Beatrice and Gabrielle Wade in the shallows, knee-deep, spaceman-slow, To fashion their maneuvers and compete Among the stationed hours to and fro, While watching through the viscid slide and swell Of water their white feet, Made curiously whiter by That cool light-bending element. Doubled by shadows on the sand they glimpse Pipefish and darting fingerlings they try Impossibly to grab, translucent shrimps Among the laceweed, seahorses intent To flee the peopled sky. Hard to conceive that they should be Precisely who they are and here, Lost in the idle luxury of play. And hard to credit that the selfsame sea That joins them in their idleness today, Careless of latitude and hemisphere, Blind with ubiquity, Churns elsewhere with a white uproar, Or wipes the Slave Coast clean of trees, Or sucks among the scum and floating drums Of some forgotten outpost founded for The advent of an age that never comes, Or bobs the remnants of atrocities Limply against the shore. What luck they have. And what good sense To leave the water with their toys When called, before their fortunes are deranged. And still the day hangs in its late suspense For hours without them, virtually unchanged, Until the bay's impregnable turquoise Relaxes its defense And sunset's dye begins to spread In flood across it to the sand They stood on, as though, hoping to disown The blood of all the innocents he'd shed, Macbeth incarnate or his grisly clone Had stooped on some far shore to rinse his hand, Making the green one red.

Someone buried red slippers under the floorboards and the mice nested in them. The floors splintered no matter how many cans of deck paint we used. And one night at the Embajada I broke a tooth, and the very next night three teenagers were shot dead as they sat at a booth by the window eating mofongo. The neighbor woman used to sing a funny song from the forties about a “road” and “clear day,” a fast car and a woman with a pistol. You could see her back had been broken, and she dragged her left foot behind her down the stairs to the mail room. And Junior began smoking crack after his church on Columbus failed and started going by his birth name which was Jesus, until he fell in love with Irma of the hideous rabbit-fur-and- white-leather jacket, who stopped the cars by waving her watery hands, smoothing her moth-bitten hair from her moon-pale face, the violet lipstick she always wore, until she wound up drowned in the East River, and no one would say if it was suicide or murder. But Junior said there were eels inside her and began preaching again, doped on the corner. Mr. Rodriguez fired him, though he didn’t want to, and after Mr. Rodriguez often looked sweaty and pale as he labored to move stuff to the basement, which he had once done with Junior to help him. We painted our rooms cinnamon, Aegean blue, repainted them eggshell, gris-perle. We fought, and you tore all my letters and diaries and sprinkled them out the window where they landed on the roof of your car, plastered there by a violent summer storm. It took hours to scrape them off; I wept and Mr. Rodriguez gave me a small plastic-wrapped packet of Kleenex and a month later you wound up in St. Luke’s on lockdown and Junior caught pneumonia, died that November. He was thirty-eight, though we had believed him older. They buried him in Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Once I rode a cab out that way — we got lost, so many ticking minutes among the slender white spikes of the graves. The red slippers — they must have been for dancing, thin soled as if with mouse skin, a powder inside that might have been talc, rosin, or years of plaster dust, a piece of   broken ribbon, black at the edges as if   burned off or torn and smeared with shoe polish. Or the mice had gnawed it. And you said “The name of the film,” and I said I thought it was a story older by far, a girl who puts on the shoes and cannot get them off, who skips down a road, then another and across the world, until her feet fall off, and her hands and they make her wooden ones.

In a pyloned desert where the scorpion reigns My love and I plucked poppies breathing tales Of crimes now long asleep, whose once–red stains Dyed stabbing men, at sea with bloody sails. The golden sand drowsed. There a dog yelped loud; And in his cry rattled a hollow note Of deep uncanny knowledge of that crowd That loved and bled in winy times remote. The poppies fainted when the moon came wide; The cur lay still. Our passionate review Of red wise folly dreamed on . . . She by my side Stared at the Moon; and then I knew he knew. And then he smiled at her; to him ’twas funny— Her calm steel eyes, her earth–old throat of honey!

At first she thought the lump in the road was clay thrown up by a trucker’s wheel. Then Beatrice saw the mess of feathers: Six or seven geese stood in the right-of-way, staring at the blood, their black heads rigid above white throats. Unmoved by passing wind or familiar violence, they fixed their gaze on dead flesh and something more, a bird on the wing. It whirled in a thicket of fog that grew up from fields plowed and turned to winter. It joined other spirits exhaled before dawn, creatures that once had crept or flapped or crawled over the land. Beatrice had heard her mother tell of men who passed as spirits. They hid in limestone caves by the river, hooded themselves inside the curved wall, the glistening rock. Then just at dark they appeared, as if they had the power to split the earth open to release them. White-robed, faceless horned heads, they advanced with torches over the water, saying: We are the ghosts of Shiloh and Bull Run fight! Neighbors who watched at the bridge knew each man by his voice or limp or mended boots but said nothing, allowed the marchers to pass on. Then they ran their skinny hounds to hunt other lives down ravines, to save their skins another night from the carrion beetles, spotted with red darker than blood, who wait by the grave for the body’s return to the earth. Some years the men killed scores, treed them in the sweetgums. Watched a man’s face flicker in the purple-black leaves. Then they burned the tree. Smoke from their fires still lay over the land where Beatrice traveled. Out of this cloud the dead of the field spoke to her, voices from the place where some voices never stop: They took my boy down by Sucarnochee Creek. He said, “Gentlemen, what have I done?” They says, “Never mind what you have done. We just want your damned heart.” After they killed him, I built up a little fire and laid out by him all night until the neighbors came in the morning. I was standing there when they killed him, down by Sucarnochee Creek.

the live oak over the nursery got a disease they could only save one limb it wasn’t surprising; it wasn’t that kind of nursery a girl rode her red tricycle around the bottom of the pool the pool had no water; it hadn’t rained the girl kept smelling her hand it smelled like honeywheat, or the inside of a girl’s panties someone said, race you she nodded okay and pedaled like hell after three laps no one had passed her she looked over her shoulder, lost her balance ripped her hands & knees on the blue concrete the one limb on the live oak curved like a question would she need stitches again there was already ink under her skin & iodine on her tongue or was it the other way around she could see black thread bunching sewing centipedes under her skin her throat burned and she couldn’t move her legs it wasn’t a tricycle it was something she couldn’t get her foot out from under she hated to stop or lose her shoe and, I’m sorry the pool was full of water

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

We watched her grow up. She was the urgent chirper, Fledgling flier. And when spring rolled Out its green She’d grown Into the most noticeable Bird-girl. Long-legged and just The right amount of blush Tipping her wings, crest And tail, and She knew it In the bird parade. We watched her strut. She owned her stuff. The males perked their armor, greased their wings, And flew sky-loop missions To show off For her. In the end There was only one. Isn’t that how it is for all of us? There’s that one you circle back to — for home. This morning The young couple scavenges seeds On the patio. She is thickening with eggs. Their minds are busy with sticks the perfect size, tufts of fluff Like dandelion, and other pieces of soft. He steps aside for her, so she can eat. Then we watch him fill his beak Walk tenderly to her and kiss her with seed. The sacred world lifts up its head To notice — We are double-, triple-blessed.

Cold blew the freezing northern blast, And winter sternly frowned; The flaky snow fell thick and fast, And clad the fields around. Forced by the storm’s relentless power, Emboldened by despair, A shivering redbreast sought my door, Some friendly warmth to share. ‘Welcome, sweet bird!’ I fondly cried, ‘No danger need’st thou fear, Secure with me thou may’st abide, Till warmer suns appear. ‘And when mild spring comes smiling on, And bids the fields look gay, Thou, with thy sweet, thy grateful song, My kindness shalt repay.’ Mistaken thought! — But how shall I The mournful truth display? An envious cat, with jealous eye, Had marked him as her prey. Remorseless wretch! — her cruel jaws Soon sealed her victim’s doom, While I in silence mourn his loss, And weep o’er robin’s tomb. So, oft in life’s uneven way, Some stroke may intervene; Sweep all our fancied joys away, And change the flattering scene.