1.
Tamping out her cigarette by the filter,
Mom, standing at the window, watched the sky.
Dad swore that he was just a bit off kilter—
a lack of self-awareness or a lie.
He’d taken their first editions from the shelf
and hauled them to the dumpster bin out back.
He’d walked through Kmart muttering to himself
and taken Mom’s concern as an attack.
I’ll check back soon, you both go on to bed,
she’d said to us that night. Just try to rest.
But we could hear him, past the doorway, tread
the floorboards in the hall, exhausted, stressed,
while, in the living room, Mom talked him down,
saying, no, there was no one at the door.
He said he couldn’t breathe, that he might drown—
a storm-tossed swimmer miles away from shore.
2.
Everyone in the loud house wished for quiet
during those stretches when our dad was manic,
when he would declaim lines by Thomas Wyatt
or scramble for his car keys in a panic,
our mom fishing a spare set from her purse
or the dish on the nightstand to keep at bay
the spate of motherfuckers or, much worse,
the smashing of a lamp, a glass ashtray,
even a window, while we held our tongues,
the boys who only spoke when spoken to,
who held the English language in our lungs
and never released it, so a silence grew,
which our dad’s voice disrupted every night,
haunting the long exhaustion of the day.
We were a hush in darkness and in light,
never quite sure of what we had to say.
3.
Days when Mom had no time to read a thing,
running errands or baking a casserole,
tending to our dad’s moods or quarreling,
each hour a star swallowed by a black hole,
each second a scrubbed chalkboard, every minute
a quarter moon hollowed to a new moon,
the days themselves a box with nothing in it,
the glamorous empty concave of a spoon,
and still she licked the stamps or folded clothes,
and weeks went by, and her friends didn’t call her,
and every line of verse flattened to prose
until, by turns, her whole life grew much smaller,
and there were dead stars still emitting light
and silences that were the ghosts of noise,
and all of them were hers, morning to night,
with her unstable husband and her boys.
4.
What was it that our mother said to us?
The self is only an illusion, dears.
She said she was no one, anonymous,
a card trick where the ace just disappears.
She burned her photographs on the back lawn,
covered the mirror over the bathroom sink,
walked away from her own shadow at dawn
because, she said, she needed time to think.
She was nobody more and more each day,
limestone subjected to the wind’s correction.
She told us she would do her best to stay,
then smoothed the map and charted a direction.
She vanished like a rabbit down a hole.
My brother used her brush, sat in her chair.
At night in bed the dark swallowed us whole.
We woke surprised to find we were still there.
5.
At sundown Dad grew restless, paranoid.
Evenings he would peer from behind the curtain
of the front window with a Polaroid
to photograph the men who he was certain
waited behind a curbside Cadillac
to disappear him. Mother was a whore,
he said, although he still wanted her back.
Snapshots of our cul de sac littered the floor
at his feet. He said the real terrorists
controlled Wall Street, the government, the schools,
that all our names were on nefarious lists.
He said that stop lights were surveillance tools.
Sometimes at night, just after he had wept,
he’d look at us and ask us what was wrong.
Like him, we didn’t eat and rarely slept.
They’re in the trees, he said. We played along.
6.
His mind rattled like ice cubes in the freezer.
Her heart was a bag she’d been too rushed to pack.
He shammed cheer in a failed attempt to please her.
We kept quiet, relieved that she’d come back.
She treated him like interest on a debt,
us kids like two rare china plates she broke
by stacking them carelessly in the cabinet,
or like honey so thick it made her choke.
She took us to the shore. He’d leave at noon
for class, then come back anxious, bringing flowers.
When he was gone, she called him a buffoon.
They occupied the house at different hours.
Done playing cops and robbers or astronauts,
we came home late one evening from the park
and found our tipsy parents pouring shots.
We heard their laughter all night in the dark.
7.
The cameras imbedded in the ceiling
the microphones under the kitchen sink
the thought that had resulted in a feeling
the feeling that started to make him think
the fidgeting that might lead to disaster
at two a.m. the stove’s blue jet of flame
the seismic tremor spidering the plaster
the stranger at the party with his name
our father slept when he should be awake
he woke at hours he should have been asleep
he stopped his mouth to cover the mistake
of laughing when it was his time to weep
now he heard weeping behind every door
in the back row when he was teaching class
behind the one-way mirror at the store
he threw a can & broke the coated glass
8.
Back from the hospital, Dad seemed himself.
The butterflies of reason fluttered back.
Mom chewed her lip. He chose from the book shelf
and read to us amid the bric a brac.
Once he was better, we slept for two days,
and when we got up, it was well past noon.
Dad said he had been “going through a phase.”
The garden flowers, bright as a cartoon,
nodded their sun-washed heads beside the drive
where we stood with him later, in the shade.
He told us it felt good to be alive,
promised us Moon Patrol at the arcade,
then asked us, panicked, where our mother was.
A slow cloud dragged across the atmosphere.
Honeybees strafed the dandelion fuzz.
At the store, her note read. Anywhere but here.
9.
The leaves like pages from a calendar.
Our mother with a shovel and a rake,
the leaf smoke making autumn just a blur.
I stood there—idle, bored, one more mistake
Mother had made by marrying our father—
while she burned the papers for her Ph.D.
(those tedious citations were a bother),
the doctorate she gave up to have me.
We watched the fire. The flames grew bigger now.
The ashes looked like dandruff in the wind,
a few flakes clinging to my mother’s brow,
her thoughts like money she would never spend.
Look, boys, the ashes almost hide the moon,
she said. Father fidgeted with his beard
and held us close. It would be winter soon.
Stray ashes swiveled up and disappeared.
10.
Now get your asses in the fucking truck,
our father yelled at us, his years a slope
leading downhill from fortune to hard luck.
He threatened to wash our mouths out with soap
when we got home. We climbed into the cab
and waited for Dad’s mood to change direction.
He twitched and scooted sideways like a crab,
then barreled, cursing, through the intersection.
In two more hours he would apologize,
but in the meantime, we just drove around.
Books haven’t helped me see through other eyes—
I’ll be this blinkered till I’m in the ground,
he said, driving by fields and water towers,
his truck a thread unwinding from a spool,
then pulled to the shoulder so we could pick flowers,
his laughter like the wisdom of a fool.
11.
All of the clocks were sorry for the trouble.
They told us when to wake and when to sleep.
Like an artillery shell lost in the rubble,
time, the promise that no one wants to keep,
crouched in the mouths of tulips and carnations.
It rusted the teeth that turned the one big gear,
cut short the fun of birthdays and vacations,
and whispered of its end in every ear.
Our father threw his watch into the river.
Mother marked days as on a prison wall.
The hours were just more arrows in the quiver,
fired at the timeless buck to make it fall.
One time we both woke up at one a.m.
and saw our father sneak out in the snow.
A woman waited in the yard for him.
The clock chimed. Voices. Cold. We watched him go.
12.
Our dad had disappeared and left no clue.
Mom thought there must be facts we hadn’t told.
She asked us to say everything we knew
at sundown. We were twelve and ten years old.
A Coca Cola can fizzed on the table.
A brown spider spun on the chandelier.
Some random anchor or show host on cable
announced that this had been a record year.
Mom sent us to our room still in our coats
to square the details. She sat in the den.
All that we didn’t know stuck in our throats
as, sunk in her chair, she told us to begin.
My brother stood. He had made up a list.
Trust was a thread our parents couldn’t sever.
He read the words he’d written on his wrist.
I closed my mouth and kept it closed forever.
13.
I saw her from the window. Brown hair. Tall.
She looked rooted in place, a statue, stuck
under the bare trees by the garden wall,
standing beside my father’s pickup truck.
Mother sat in the study, brooding. She
smoked, lost in thought, reading Hart Crane and Keats.
She told me, The best days are first to flee,
and said she loved us. Deep beneath the sheets
my brother napped. Alone, I made a bowl
of Lucky Charms and knelt at the TV—
a single bright leaf eddying in a shoal,
caught in a current no one else could see.
Some evenings later, Father came back home
to find our mother standing on the lawn,
grinding her garden boots in the cold loam.
It’s over now, he said. I swear she’s gone.
14.
A quiet evening. No one else around.
Splinter of moon. Doves on the power lines.
We both sat on the porch and heard no sound
except our parents’ whispers, the cracked spines
of books they thumbed idly. I watched the fire-
flies’ intermittent code flash in the trees.
And if Dad’s mood was slowly climbing higher
—the pressured speech, the odd conspiracies—
just then he seemed the very soul of reason,
talking to us all in a measured voice
about the insurrection and brave treason
in Paradise Lost—“reason also is choice”—
and of his own “unconquerable will.”
Suddenly the doves on the lines had flown
and night crept up over the distant hill.
We huddled there together, each alone.
15.
Our mother watched the clock for signs of trouble,
drinking her lukewarm coffee in the den.
Before dawn our father, face gray with stubble,
wild-eyed and wide awake, would stumble in
saying that things were great, that things were grand,
that literature had led him straight to God,
saying things that no one could understand
and answering questions with a distant nod.
Mother would keep us in our room till morning,
bringing us mint tea if we were awake,
or, if he seemed irate, giving us warning,
locking the thin wood door for caution’s sake.
We heard him pace the floors at two a.m.,
talking out loud as if someone were there.
The same thing kept on happening to him.
And us? We stayed invisible as air.
16.
The exegesis of the sacred text
the propagandist spinning useful lies
the author who invents what happens next
the language that reveals & reifies
our father in a black tuxedo jacket
our mother in high heels & white silk gown
the wedding picture slouching on its bracket
the high seat on the seesaw coming down
our father’s sense of wonder & elation
the trouble he could never quite avoid
his refusal to take his medication
the bad thoughts itching like a hemorrhoid
the living up past midnight by mistake
staring at ceiling tiles & counting sheep
the dead in their pajamas by the lake
fluffing their pillows for an endless sleep
17.
Snowflakes are lakes of mistakes inside the sky,
Dad said in a rambling fusillade of speech.
A spring moon’s meretricious glamor, high
above, hung in the branches, out of reach.
Words tumbled over each other in defeat.
Beyond the window, street lamps shone like pearls
and cast their brilliance at the evening’s feet.
Late crickets drowned the chattering of squirrels.
Time is so loud the cloud is proud of night,
he said to our mom, with exuberance,
and we could tell that something wasn’t right,
though he made an adjacent kind of sense.
She dressed and drove him to the hospital.
Stars stippled the windowpane like chicken pox.
School. Band practice. She kept our schedules full.
We counted off the days like ticking clocks.
18.
Dad said that he was in a special jail.
He said the walls were streaked a jealous black.
He said his thoughts were letters in the mail
labeled “return to sender” and sent back.
My brother and I played spades in the corner
while Dad met Mom at the visitation table.
He looked bad. The doctors had tried to warn her.
She sat with him for as long as she was able,
said, I’ll stay with you, gathered us, and left.
Outside, she leaned, choked up, against the car,
saying what happened was a kind of theft.
There’s what you have, she said, and what you are.
A sickness like that steals one, then the other,
God knows, until there’s nothing left but lies.
She leaned down in the dark and kissed my brother,
then swept a lock of hair out of my eyes.
19.
Turquoise water. The boardwalk. Briny air.
The sea broke at our feet and we were glad.
A fat yellow sun shimmered to declare
our father well again, who had been mad.
Light spangled on him, merciless, at noon.
Our mother wore her sadness like a shawl.
A palmetto tree nodded on a dune.
She repeated, All is nothing, nothing all,
digging her feet into the dirty sand
while gulls breasted the wind and the sea hissed.
My father reached and tried to hold her hand,
and, when she wouldn’t, grabbed her by the wrist.
We trudged across the beach, back to the car.
The black seats scorched the backs of our bare legs.
Maybe, she said, this is just who we are,
as the pale clouds drained sunlight to the dregs.
20.
They whispered at night like conspirators,
eating Swiss cheese and cold cuts from the fridge,
played guess-the-poet (“Hope is the thing with feathers”),
discussed poor Keats, and Byron’s privilege,
and laughed for hours in front of the TV.
They took us into town, nights, for ice cream,
and we hung ornaments on the Christmas tree—
some vaudevillian American dream
in which our dad maintained his sanity
with Lithium and infrequent exercise
and Mom swapped freedom for instability.
A few stars shone, oblivious, in the skies.
My brother squinted into his telescope
while I read novels in a swivel chair.
True happiness had always been a trope.
The dark background just made the stars look bare.
21.
What do we have to say to one another?
Sun slumps behind the houses inch by inch.
I sit on the porch a long time with my brother
and listen to an anxious, bickering finch
high in a gum tree. We don’t say a word.
As far as speech, when had it been our turn?
Our parents’ voices were all we ever heard,
making our own much harder to discern,
so now they’ve passed on I prefer the calm,
the rich suggestion of what isn’t said.
A dragonfly dips to my brother’s palm
like a scholar to a text too long unread.
Each of us studies the moon’s silver ring,
sky at the ragged edges of the day.
Even the finch has stopped its chattering.
It is, of course, the silence that will stay.