I am riding a train,
night without stars
counting refractions
on sealed windows
nearing home.

Nish lived there, miscast
among lace curtains.
At sixteen he slashed his knife through
a Safeway clerk, five times,
whose carotid gushed
for thirty dollars and change.
When I get there
his mother's dark head, weight
she never again upheld,
rocked in my mother's arms.

          My hand always shakes when I try
          to draw a straight line
          from one point to another.

I had a friend who called
late at night
she couldn't breathe.
Sometimes
she took a taxi
to the Outpatient.
The resident said you don't need
Indereal, there's nothing wrong
with your heart.

She keeps reciting the litany:
a dead man's wallet beside his pillow,
a photo of a ten year old girl
where the money used to be.
His blue Buick rotting
in the driveway. Doilies wormy
beneath the Hammond Atlas.
Limoges hair-receiver crammed
with paper clips, cancelled
stamps, dead nails, gramophone,
once her head fit inside.

I never choose to recall
the dream of a woman thinning
tubers of blue iris in damp ground.
A telephone guttering through sleep
and they might as well have said
light travels at 186,000 miles per second.
It's impossible to imagine
stars are born and die
nobody knew.
Not Ptolemy, Copernicus.

          Jesus, if it passes all understanding
          how do we recognize peace?

My Aunt Mamie knew at sixteen
how to graft the branch
of a pear tree or quince,
binding each to a matrix
with a kind of poultice.
Before I wake tomorrow
a surgeon will have sliced
away her left breast.
She is eighty.
None of us ever learned
to grow life in her straight,
symmetrical fashion.

I understand we are not in heaven or hell.
We are guests of the state
the Fathers called limbo.
People in caravans circling
for centruies. Some crept
into the woods, silenced.
Others built temples for children
who sought alcoves where wind
scorched least, and the long shadows
after noon . . .

          Forgetting is a mode of action.
          Sleep, a dense text.

I follow a line
of light-eaters
who call themselves
a sorry lot of dreamers.
Fished from the runnels
of coffin ships in Boston Harbor
full of green hunger and hookworms,
they fed on visions
of the Holyu Spirit rising
in the sap of New World trees.

They spun fire, air, sand,
keeping it molten
in the glassworks,
blew their breath
through long iron tubes, hoped
for perfect forms at the end.
They honed tools
to carve relief in supercooled globes,
earned day wages, mouthed public gratitude,
sure of what to expect
from this world.

In their orchards
healed branches burgeon.
The redbud opens first, then the leaves.
Memory, dance in me,
Eighth sacrament, restorer.