Three Days
I am on the front porch holding the leash of my little dog.
My son, four years old, comes out the front door, his jacket on. But he has forgotten his shoes.
I hand him the leash. He loves to hold her.
When I come back out, they are both gone.
His shoes in my hand, I circle the house, calling his name.
Where are they? I go down the street toward the woods, just a house or so.
I feel panic rise inside. I head back to the house. I call his name louder. I stand in our front yard.
We live one house from the corner of a busy street.
But we never walk that way, except to take his older sister to school, so I don’t look in that direction.
Then I see from the corner of my eye and turn:
Our dog breaks through the bushes, trailing the leash, loping from the direction of the busy street.
My son appears on the corner, running after her on his bare tip toes, which makes him seem to float across the ground, calling her.
She had pulled away from his hand and run toward the school.
He chased her — he kept her safe.
Did she stay on our side of the street,
or did she run across?
He hesitates before he answers me.
Unsure if he has done the right thing.
I see the cars slowing or stopping in mid traffic, in my mind.
I have been to this place before.
~
The feel of the soil, its wet structure, its mud and clay and sand, between your hands.
It was April, and it had rained heavily.
A good time, always, to weed the garden. Everything would come up easily by the roots.
I imagine you had irises, as you did in the city, where you moved afterwards, before you had me.
Though you never touched them, they were there when you bought the house, you called them my irises.
The girls were playing in the back.
You could hear them, I imagine, though sometimes they were quiet, lost, absorbed in their three- and five-year-old play, perhaps in the mud.
In my parenting I may understand you most.
In many ways, I did not know you.
I was gardening.
Witnesses said the girls were pulled from the canal by firemen shortly after being reported missing.
I put my hands in the soil. The rest of the world disappears.
The flood of the mistake,
it passes through these islands of hills and willows.
~
When a polder began to subside, it went too soon from its mother, they said.
On top of the peat, you get a sandy layer, on top of the sand, you get a layer of clay.
In the springtime, during a flood, because the reeds had all been cut, the water moved very fast.
I passed the time in the shop with the mechanic —
It rained for three days as I waited for the new rim to come.
Driving from my sister’s in the north on my way to the archive, so many books in the same place, I had blown out a tire,
then bumped in the rain to the next town and ruined the rim.
And the different people in the garage.
A butcher, a programmer, and then his daughter.
Each day, as the mechanic moved into and out of each car’s frame in her workshop,
she told the same story, differently each time.
As if to say, my heart has changed.
As if to ask, have you been to a place like this before.
* * * * *
Coppice
I am a heart patient, open-heart five times since my birth.
For me it seems a little too much like a sculpture, something made by people.
Every time they change it here, a piece breaks off. It won’t be the same any more.
Then I learn something.
Sometimes a willow cutter gets his own leg.
He has to wait a week for the tides, for the others to come back.
When the water comes, I can live upstairs.
I have a canoe.
Years after my grandfather died,
I was out for firewood,
in a woods my family didn’t normally use.
I found my grandfather’s wood-knife.
They hunted for eel,
because they didn’t have money to buy meat.
You see mostly what is before you.
All of a sudden, he had a hare. He caught it with a noose.
I think he didn’t want me to see. He told me to go check the rods.
When I came back, the hare’s jacket was off, his intestines were out, and we baked him on the grill.
I found my grandfather’s wood-knife, a willow grown completely around it.
* * * * *
Cicadas
We were in the front yard on the concrete of the driveway.
I put food in the tin and you whistled. Callie, mother
of uncountable kittens, came. You rubbed her neck
with your knuckles as she ate from the tin.
I asked a question. Something I thought you, my mother,
would know. I can’t remember the words,
yours or mine, only our two bodies.
What are they for?
Decades later,
in the different summer leaves above,
the same voices
chatter, as if to answer.