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I give a piece quite near away, then another, one and two to three and say good-bye with some dismay. We might have been twins, I born in May and she of the blistered January colored like the vibrant cray- on, clinging on to toys of the day, as mine become that of history. “Again,” she cries and I obey. I hold the script of the gone by matinee: before I ever found a scar, a yawn, a he; past the years I’ve spun to macramé. Soon I must go, and she will stay, dwelling under the apple tree, never to wander blind in first foray. Sentient air, lead her not to disarray. She flails. I walk. We are matching memory. I have things she never will, a little say. So I pull away and board the last ferry. Treasures, 2014 by Leanna Wright

Sorting out letters and piles of my old Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards That meant something once, I happened to find Your picture.That picture. I stopped there cold, Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard Who has turned up a severed hand. Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender, In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned Us all. Well, our needs were different, then, And our ideals came easy. Then through the war and those two long years Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear, Prove it had been, that it might come back. That was before we got married. —Before we drained out one another’s force With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still, I put back your picture. Someday, in due course, I will find that it’s still there.

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you? And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems, and new! But you were living before that, And you are living after, And the memory I started at— My starting moves your laughter! I crossed a moor, with a name of its own And a certain use in the world no doubt, Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone 'Mid the blank miles round about: For there I picked up on the heather And there I put inside my breast A moulted feather, an eagle-feather— Well, I forget the rest.

At the toll booth she stopped to ask who was in charge of the expressway, or future, the words slipping back and forth in front of her. A large-headed woman, her hair roped and lashed about her head, looked up and held out her hand:George Washington. Seven times. I have no money, she said, suddenly aware that this was indeed a fact, as was the yoke around the woman’s upright neck. Her nostrils flared, her body strained against it, Al Green in the background.Are you a poet? she asked, meaning do you feel that tug?The roar of tires is the rhythm of my day, the woman said,every fourteen cars a sonnet. Behind her the city slickened: vehicles everywhere, idling, honking, revving, stiffening themselves against her. The braided woman did not flinch.George Washington, seven times. I am lost, she said.Can you tell me where to start? The braided woman’s thumbs smoothed the air.You can try Port Authority. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. In response to the woman’s kindness, she shared her latest vision: Louis XVI is alive and living in Washington, a staggeringly blind man filling his frame with BBQ ribs and glazed ham. Under his bed he keeps a rifle, thinking a cattle rustler might show up in the night. Deeply suspicious of his dreams he hires a young woman to stand in the corner and lash herself all night as he sleeps. It doesn’t matter if I see her, he said,it’s knowing she is somewhere lashing herself.

for J In my life so much happens that I would like to write about, but then something else happens & things are always happening. You, my friend, are underground & will always be there. I did not help you, but you always helped me. When I was an atheist, I believed in people. Now as a nihilist, my grief has no hope. And I could say there is no reason to keep going, but then I think of, I think of you.

To the young and able man who lets his death come in with veils in his face that say you can come in and claim a place among us. To the young man who closes his eyes to the parting of clouds and lets what is beyond come in. To the young man whose body is still warm, that weightless being with halos, whose footsteps we will never fill. To the endless clock machine in the god body of the young man who closes his eyes as the light sweeps him to eternity. To the blessed beating of his heart when we listen to our closed palms. To the complex latticework of smiles in his photographs every two seconds you pick him up and back. God body love. Good-bye. To the young man whose laughter is now a memorial among us, as we sit under tents, listen to our mothers and sisters cry, shed our own not-so-private god tears love, shelter under the night that claimed him. To him and beyond and the endless love through which God privately loves him.

It is easily forgotten, year to year, exactly where the plot is, though the place is entirely familiar— a willow tree by a curving roadway sweeping black asphalt with tender leaves; damp grass strewn with flower boxes, canvas chairs, darkskinned old ladies circling in draped black crepe family stones, fingers cramped red at the knuckles, discolored nails, fresh soil for new plants, old rosaries; such fingers kneading the damp earth gently down on new roots, black humus caught in grey hair brushed back, and the single waterfaucet, birdlike upon its grey pipe stem, a stream opening at its foot. We know the stories that are told, by starts and stops, by bent men at strange joy regarding the precise enactments of their own gesturing. And among the women there will be a naming of families, a counting off, an ordering. The morning may be brilliant; the season is one of brilliances—sunlight through the fountained willow behind us, its splayed shadow spreading westward, our shadows westward, irregular across damp grass, the close-set stones. It may be that since our walk there is faltering, moving in careful steps around snow-on-the-mountain, bluebells and zebragrass toward that place between the willow and the waterfaucet, the way is lost, that we have no practiced step there, and walking, our own sway and balance, fails us.

After Walt Whitman A last formality is running late, as a life can't, this hot day. The final ethereal glow of the sun seems to come up from underfoot in this parkland of polysyllabic death. These deep graves, two this time, neatly cut into the earth, await the arrivals, and two adjacent heaps of damp fertile glebe are half blanketed by reticent dark tarpaulins. After the full moon's first moments of horizon-magnified fact and risen largesse, it has contracted as our heaven has passed it by and now it floats above the crowns of the inky trees and well beyond bare roofs. It has always been an entity born dead—not a phantom, as must be this son, a muddy part of whom soared from cratered waste lands far away before landing here, and also this veteran father, whose heart staggered into an ER and failed after he heard what circumstance had done to his one boy. No horses—hearses, the first two cars. A corps of six men— they bear the heavy coffined corpse of the father toward his very small opening in the planet; and six more envoys of duty, with much-practiced attentiveness, slow-step the light son, an imperfect cadaver with handles, to his own last place. White gloves lift up the draped famed cloth, super-striped and starry, from the younger casket, fold it just so— hands with hands over hands in ritual honor, a ceremony neither of mystical creed nor of doubter's midnights—then they advance it to the one who remains. She's looking away from her burials, down at the blades of moon grass. She feels no great gut blows from startled convulsive big drums that shake the spirits of mourners, nor any whirring of equally perilous small drums that might reduce the silence. The son is submitted as lifeless organism to dirt; the father’s remains descend into his pit alongside, likewise on tightly held ropes men slowly let slip. (In foremost ranks of a final unbecoming these two fell alike.) The ropes snake back up into what's left of natural light— remainder of the ancient calculus of day and night. From a boom box ten paces away, the familiar bugled notes say that the journey of these remains is done. Even if no grief shadows the bugler, bugles do sound it, word it—that unacceptable sentence of slow notes. Distant, on overtime, respectful, yet much too near, a stranger waits to start up a backhoe. On such occasions, after courage of soldiers or folly of command or cold wrong purposes among patriarchs, lords, kings, and freed madness in red valleys, mountains, cities, villages, in schools, shrines, sheds, beds, mud-brick hearts, we have offered up our mortally wounded, un- comprehending remembrance. We look down or away and notice the impassive grass under our bloody weight.

All that's left is the shroud the back wings. Roaches scurrying in the kitchen. There’s no greater threat than this time at hand. Drunken cackles from the street. Still damp from 4 AM rain. I missed the instructions for this part. The trap. The deflate of dream. Utopia was always supposed to be right at hand. Right and left. Any which way we’d make of it. Marine layer won’t budge for the rumble under our feet. Sky tears open in the north. Sirens on high. A small pool forms in the buckle of asphalt. In its gentle tremble the reflection of the grey white mass overhead with a perfect seam of blue. The rift where the dead speak how-tos.

1 After our march from the Hudson to the top of Cemetery Hill, we Boy Scouts proudly endured the sermons and hot sun while Girl Scouts lolled among graves in the maple shade. When members of the veterans’ honor guard aimed their bone-white rifles skyward and fired, I glimpsed beneath one metal helmet the salmon-pink flesh of Mr. Webber’s nose, restored after shrapnel tore it. 2 Friends who sat near me in school died in Asia, now lie here under new stones that small flags flap beside. It’s fifth-grade recess: war stories. Mr. Webber stands before us and plucks his glass eye from its socket, holds it high between finger and thumb. The girls giggle and scream; the awed boys gape. The fancy pocket watch he looted from a shop in Germany ticks on its chain.