Intersection
In that
one click-
second
they are
three:
the child,
her sister,
and her sister’s
shadow
that covers
half
the child
up
against cold brick,
a
wall
on Empire
corner
of Kingston,
where
a shadow
casts
a shadow,
a pale outline
in
high
heeled pumps,
one foot poised,
her front
hairs piled,
dark
lips apart.
Under
the child’s snug hat
her hair
hides
for the moment.
Lagniappe
1.
The child sits on the
beach thinking it will be green inside as she builds with her pail and
smoothes with her shovel that leaves indentations where she doesn’t want
them because these lines define spaces that don’t want to be limited yet
and shouldn’t ever be, her mother writes as she writes, this child is in
both of us, we’re both building and smoothing but only when the tide is out
and we’re the only family still on the beach when the sun is behind us in
the west waiting for us to go before it drops below the bay where the boats
are coming after dropping hopeful lines and well constructed nets into
water where the fish don’t stand a chance, one reason the two of them will
be vegetarians when the child turns fourteen and her mother is 29 years
older than she is and will be for the rest of their lives.
2.
The last few days the
air has been wetter over the Raritan River and what color and here’s the
fog that the sky blue BMW needs to invade to get from there to there and I
need to pull my jacket up from the seat and up over my shoulders and he
needs to fiddle with the heat lever until a thinly heated air pushes its
way through the mesh of ducts and up the inside of the windows and look, we
laugh, we are making a fog in here that I can spell into but I whisper
“what isn’t it?” and by the time we stop and I say the “when will we?” even
“the” will want to feel what the damp is hiding under my tongue.
3.
Always green, the
interior is always green as soon as dark falls around her, whether her eyes
are closed or not, green bedroom after bedroom, and from any of these
bedrooms she can see into a room she will call the living room, for what
else should she call it, the passing room, the
room-she-can-see-from-any-of-the-bedrooms she wanders through and although
she and her daughter 23 years later are one, her startlingly beautiful face
having replaced hers, but that’s what she supposes: there are no mirrors in
these rooms that the two-in-one pass through always passing never stopping
or sitting the way the two of them sit on the beach as they construct each
day each new home for them to wander into when the sun will fade into the
bay where fish out-of-danger, finally, can feed and sleep.
Take away two
Philosophy
I pushed into the
toilet’s
icy bottom to
try to remember the
third
time she told her how
fast I slid (without
gills) from
watery into
water.
Law
Picked up by a gust,
she hits,
butt first, the western
wall of Philosophy.
Whoa!
Up again and smacks
Law on its eastern
flank. Stands
up and shouts: I’m not
I’m not.
Philosophy
Judi’s corn-silk
braid and my
hair brush, she unbe-
coming, her jewels
jangling
against pale blue silk
an unappearing
ribbon,
a blue string, a thread,
a was.
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