Dan Gerber

My mother weeping in the dark hallway, in the arms of a man, not my father, as I sat at the top of the stairs unnoticed— my mother weeping and pleading for what I didn't know then and can still only imagine— for things to be somehow other than they were, not knowing what I would change, for, or to, or why, only that my mother was weeping in the arms of a man not me, and the rain brought down the winter sky and hid me in the walls that looked on, indifferent to my mother's weeping, or mine, in the rain that brought down the dark afternoon.

Often I imagine the earth through the eyes of the atoms we’re made of— atoms, peculiar atoms everywhere— no me, no you, no opinions, no beginning, no middle, no end, soaring together like those ancient Chinese birds hatched miraculously with only one wing, helping each other fly home.

When you are angry it’s your gentle self I love until that’s who you are. In any case, I can’t love this anger any more than I can warm my heart with ice. I go on loving your smile till it finds its way back to your face.

Behind the house in a field there's a metal box I buried full of childhood treasure, a map of my secret place, a few lead pennies from 1943. The rest I've forgotten, forgotten even the exact spot I covered with moss and loam. Now I'm back and twenty years have made so little difference I suspect they never happened, this face in the mirror aged with pencil and putty. I suspect even the box has moved as a mole would move to a new place long ago.

You know how, after it rains, my father told me one August afternoon when I struggled with something hurtful my best friend had said, how worms come out and crawl all over the sidewalk and it stays a big mess a long time after it’s over if you step on them? Leave them alone, he went on to say, after clearing his throat, and when the rain stops, they crawl back into the ground.