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Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.

Here I am saying “The leaves are falling” —one of those choruses that vie with interminable verses to mock hoarders. Yeah, we get that a palette of winds is a pretty thing: one blurs the anther, another the river splurging on riprap, expunging phosphates, out of the temperature differential building sculptural fogs that promenade between shores a glacier wedged ajar, a fjord. Whatever gives the river its seriousness reverses in the light of those clouds moving as if absorbing their pomp in advance of it— characters which untied the painter and took the sculls again.

A gust roused the waves, leaves blew into the water, the waves were ash-gray, the sky tin-gray, ash-gray the autumn. It was good for my heart: there my feelings were ash-gray, the sky tin-gray, ash-gray the autumn. The breath of wind brought cooler air, the waves of mourning brought separation: autumn and autumn befriend each other.

Wahiawa is still a red dirt town where the sticky smell of pineapples being lopped off in the low-lying fields rises to mix with the minty leaves of eucalyptus in the bordering gulch. We lived there near the edge where the orchids grew huge as lanterns overnight and the passion fruits rotted on the vines before they could be picked. We grew there in the steady rain that fell like a gray curtain through which my mother peered: patches of depression. She kept the children under cover. We built houses within houses, stripping our parents’ bed of pillows and sheets, erecting walls out of The National Geographic which my father had subscribed to for years. We feasted on those pictures of the world, while the mud oozed past the windows knocking over the drab green leaves of palm fronds as we ate our spinach. The mildew grew in rings around the sink where centipedes came swimming up the pipes on multiple feet and the mold grew around our small fingers making everything slippery to touch. We were squeamish and pale. I remember one night my sister screamed. All the lights blinked on in the house. In the sudden brightness, we rushed to her room and found her crumpled in the far corner of the bed, her nightgown twisted in a strange shape; her eyes were as huge as mine, staring into the eyes of the bat that clung to the screen. Its rodent fingers finally letting go as my father jabbed its furry body with the end of a broom.

November 2015 1 Open up for close out    soul-clothes    every- thing has to go    closing down time    call them all saints    souls    my own gone ones:  Andy    Marcia    Mary Alice Mary Anne     cloud of all    carried out 2 outside my window: locust, cloth of gold     on the ground: its yellow tabs   linden hearts   sweetgum stars like cut-outs from the same ... paper-napkin ghosts in a tree near the house where a year ago my friend — rust-colored chrysanthemums   rust-colored door 3 door to door the angel no the Lord passed or did not pass — the angel opened the prison door     doors to pass through, out or in:  our millions, more than any — in the other story the Lord said:to put a difference between 4 between one and another a gun:  at one end it’s a good gun because at the other’s a cell phone pill bottle toy gun nothing a Trayvon    Tamir    Dontre    Michael Laquan    Eric    Rekia    John:    call them out and the others, black and many 5 many thousand gone    no more auction block

Leaving the beach on a Sunday in a streetcar a family of three—mother, son and daughter: the mother, well on in the thirties, blond hair, worried face; the son, twelve years of age or so, seated opposite, and the daughter, about eight or nine, beside her. The boy was blond, too; a good-looking little fellow with dreamy eyes. The little girl was quite plain; mouth pulled down at the corners, sharp angry eyes behind eyeglasses. No sooner were they seated than the boy, speaking gently, said, “Today was one of the most wonderful days I ever had.” The girl said shrilly, “I wish we could live in one of those houses”— looking at the bungalows along the shore— “then we could go to the beach every day.” The mother did not answer either. The beach they were coming from was crowded with poor people; and the family was dressed cheaply but was neat and spotless, even after the day’s outing. I wondered idly where the father was: at work? dead? divorced? After a while the mother said, weighing her words, “You know Mister. . .” I did not hear the name: it was spoken so softly. She was talking to the boy. “He goes fishing every Wednesday. I think I can get him to take you along.” The boy did not answer for a minute or two and then said, in his gentle voice, “I should like it very much.” “Can I go too?” asked the little girl shrilly, but no one answered her. Mother and son had eyes only for each other. She took out her handkerchief and wiped his face. He complained of something in his eye— certainly not enough to make him blink— and she raised the upper lid and lowered the lower lid to look for it. The little girl stood up to look out of the window and the boy said to his mother, “She stepped on my toes and did not even say, Excuse me, please.” The mother turned to the little girl and said sharply, “Why didn’t you say, Excuse me? You should have said, Excuse me, brother.” The little girl said nothing, face turned toward the window, the corners of her mouth far down and her eyes, bright and dry, looking sharply through her glasses.

As the doors glide shut behind me, the world flares back into being— I exist again, recover myself, sunlight undimmed by dark panes, the heat on my arms the earth’s breath. The wind tongues me to my feet like a doe licking clean her newborn fawn. At my back, days measured by vital signs, my mouth opened and arm extended, the nighttime cries of a man withered child-size by cancer, and the bells of emptied IVs tolling through hallways. Before me, life—mysterious, ordinary— holding off pain with its muscular wings. As I step to the curb, an orange moth dives into the basket of roses that lately stood on my sickroom table, and the petals yield to its persistent nudge, opening manifold and golden.

I. The people who watch me hang my coat on a peg at the office don't even know about that other life, the life when there was you,it, however briefly. To them my body is a fact casual as the weather. I could tell them: That day it rained the way it rains in the New World. Leaves struck the window like daggers. I didn't think about God but the ones we used to worship the ones who want your heart still beating, who load you with gold and lure you to sleep deep in the cenote. II. A girl, he said, and I nodded though we couldn't have known. I would have left him then for ten thousand pesos. I don't know what world you inhabit, swimming there, baby, not-baby, part of my body, not me, swept aside like locks of hair or toenail parings. It's ten years today and you who were never alive pull a face in the leaves of jacaranda, the only tree that lives outside my window. It must be your voice whistling through the office window, though I can't understand your words. Comfort or accusation, I can't understand your words.

for Cosetta Once there were coyotes, cardinals in the cedar. You could cure amnesia with the trees of our back-forty. Once I drowned in a monsoon of frogs— Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes. Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing, never spoke about her childhood or the faces in gingerbread tins stacked in the closet. She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. But I don’t know this kind of burial: vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, peach trees choked by palms. New neighbors tossing clipped grass over our fence line, griping to the city of our overgrown fields. Grandma fell in love with a truck driver, grew watermelons by the pond on our Indian allotment, took us fishing for dragonflies. When the bulldozers came with their documents from the city and a truckload of pipelines, her shotgun was already loaded. Under the bent chestnut, the well where Cosetta’s husband hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots her bundle of beads.They tell the story of our family.

She is proud of her papá because he comes to their little grey school, converted from army barracks, to teach español to Mrs. Brenda’s fifth grade. And that means they don’t have to listen to that awful Señora Beister on TV with her screech owl version of “Las mañanitas” and her annoying forefinger to the ear, Escuchen and then to the lips, y repitan. He teaches them to order Coca-Cola en el restaurán– Señor, quisiera una Coca, por favor– and the names of all the utensils– cuchara, cuchillo, tenedor. The children look at him funny when he picks up the knife. Next week he will demonstrate the bullfights he watched in Mexico when he was muy chiquitito. He will choose a boy to snort, stomp, charge the red cloth that Papá will snap at his side as he dodges the sharp-horned strike, stabs invisible swords into the boy’s hide and makes the children laugh.