Bearings

The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash, a reaction sending out runners across her chest, a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back into fashion, their son coming back from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger spread down the long hallway of their house and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’s doubled beds, her doubled face in family portraits that double in frequency, a family set down and another, this dinnertime and more red wine, our faces flush with love and sympathy, the mother decides to see the son again, and so our doubled flashlights giving us heaven and earth, all of it safe or at least unmoving, the tall fence her ex built to hide the little grave, to guard the lot in this registered historic district (all of the houses bear their stories on a plaque, their first stories, run-on, this little town with no street lights, just moon, cedars), the tall fence behind which is the yard, blue, in this yard no marker stone and under this stone their son’s everything, no double, no double