Hardened bread, a humiliation. Ever since
Annie Dillard chewed me
out in class for submitting a poem
about rolling one down a Connecticut hill,
I’ve avoided the whole boiling

water bath affair.

Baking—no. Soda—yes.
Can’t deny the benefit
of a little fine grain
sea salt. Never wear jewelry
on the fingers or wrists.

I am pliable. I will look you directly

in the eye, arms akimbo, recite
teapot metaphors, promise
to meet you along
the New York Bight
when it thaws.

You’ll find me at the top

of Sandy Hook Light
the next time
I’m searching for a sign
my father would have easily detected.
I’ll bring a baker’s dozen

fresh from H&H.

With the shortest day of the year
only 100 hours away, she is doom
eager for a delicious darkness.

An emptiness that will electrify
as daylight shrinks.

She will wallow in the moment
the sun’s center sinks six degrees
below the horizon.

She will no longer need
to shield her eyes with her hands.

On the shortest day, light
will leak everywhere at all hours—
a most precious blood

to pour into the sky with a teardrop-
shaped tureen turned upside down.

Wearing a wily duende smile,
she whispers: “There is nothing civil
about civil twilight.”

It’s been
too long. I take
you off the bottom shelf,
wipe the dust from your feathered tail
and crest.

I see
a resemblance
to Noguchi’s set piece
for a Martha Graham masterwork
Judith.

I miss
that primitive
tent of true foreboding—
no longer on display in the
garden.

Sculpture
of seduction,
voids, decapitation,
a biblical praying mantis
in bronze.

Runners
instead of spears,
muzzle instead of fangs,
you soothe away the violence of
the past.

I hear
you hum, tiny
wrought-iron rocking horse,
late at night when no one’s around
save us.

She forgets how to tango
with the least tern
after it migrates to Argentina.
These winter boots have chased away
any grace she had left.

Wild turkeys dodge snow banks.
Squirrels cackle at her
as she runs by. Is it because
she has forgotten how to tango
with civil twilight?

Is it because the raven appears
demystified in the fog?
She forgot how to tango long before
crossing the bridge—its international
orange her model for taking a stand

against the sky and ocean. A miracle
that such a boisterous cry for help
can erupt from such a puny body.
She will have forgotten
how tango hummingbird mint

clashes with the Bethlehem Steel towers
when she finally plants beds of it
in her coastal garden.
So desperate to be mesmerized
by the 80-beats-per-minute buzz

of the tiny creature’s fluttering wings
as they draw invisible figure eights
in the air. Her own heart races
at the site of a spectral owl
in a mountain forest she stumbles into

on her way back east. Stories
told during a memorial service still linger
in the sloped meadow beyond the way
Ruth Stone would have whispered the last
lines to her poem “The Train Ride”:

“All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.”
As for the tango,
she forgot
she never learned how.

the moon illuminates
another time I found myself

holding a wooden box filled
with postcards in my trembling hands.

I was young and naive
enough to believe

they would be addressed to me.

Photo after photo—
London, Sydney, Bogata, Paris, Berlin,

Lisbon, Baghdad, Tokyo, Havana, Mumbai—
all written to nobody.

I dreamed of how Emily and I
might have whispered secret etymologies

to one another under the covers
the way sisters do.

I studied the handwriting in each:
how he signed his name

with an exaggerated loop
in the first letter,

the creative spelling,
the blue jokes, the references

to a heightened intimacy long ago.

Who was this baby, this darling,
this dove, this keeper of his soul?

None of them dated.
None stamped.

None of them mailed or delivered
to their intended.

The one letter he did send me
long shredded (photocopied first

after the blood, before the violence
ensued) is the only one that’s mine.

This time,
it’s mahogany not cedar.

It’s a smaller stack,
representing only cities

in North America: Seattle, Minneapolis,
Boston, LA, Nashville, Atlanta,

New York (of course). This time,
it’s my own handwriting

and inability to follow through.
A lost calendar with moon cycles

marked in red
lines the bottom.

She’s been trying too hard
to wrap some light
around her little finger.

She will celebrate the fact
that fireflies are actually beetles.

She worries
about the lone wild turkey
lurking outside the ice rink

the way she never would
that gang of toms.

She once considered jet propulsion while getting ready to spend
a night with a chain of salps.

She has wanted to be his
muse when all along

she needed him
to be hers. A secret walk-in
closet leads to a walk-on

part in a walk-out phase
with no apparent end.

Even our sun will die eventually.
I had forgotten how cold
it will get inside. How haunting
the drone must be on the way outside in
the galactic underworld. How lonely
for those of us left behind
searching for the light
in the wrong sky. And so it is
with this parallel eddy in the ocean—
another black hole to try to resist,
or give up the ghost as we pour more
ancient sticky water to drink.

When I die, throw me
a wedding, not a wake.
Celebrate my marriage
to the earth with the same gusto
I was never betrothed while I breathed.
Wrapped in a mushroom shroud,
through aquamation or human composting,
or nourishing the fish

in an eternal reef, I promise
to be true to the only home I’ve known.
Staying up all night (waking
neighbors belting out drunken ballads)
surrounded by bodies—been there,
done that. So last century.

A drizzly morning up north
on the fourth Thursday in November

takes its time to clear.

The storytellers hide from other truths
in tulle veils:

wedding or funeral, birdcage or blusher.

We all do it. I’m so guilty,
my hands stained with bruise

colored ink expose another

underwater smoke screen.
I’ve looked it up before.

I remember the initial thick part,

the obscuring middle,
the final mist.

I’ll look it up again as I move closer

to the sea grasses and beg
more clouds to touch the ground.

A crow flies overhead
as the fog clears
to reveal a ravine.

And this is how
we say good-bye.

I accidentally tuck my bag
into the bin
wheels out.

And this is
how we say good-bye.

The rental car agent
mistakes me for a wife.
Tells my friend I can drive

the vehicle too.
Asks if we are headed to a wedding.
Wrong on all three counts.

This is how
we say good-bye.

Memories of discovering
a baby squid along the Connecticut shore
and watching “Search for Tomorrow”

in a crooked old house
the university tore down
to build a new athletic facility.

This is also how
we say good-bye.

We wind our way up Mount Tam
to watch the sun set.
For some of us, motion sickness

and pressure in the ears
interfere with the view.
And this is how

joy and grief collide in the margins.
The edge of the sea, all that laughter,
those throwaway asides

are precisely
how we say good-bye.

Crow or raven? And now
I cannot remember the shape
of the beak, or sound

of the bird’s call—
merely a streak of black
scraping against the sky.

And wouldn’t he reply
a feather is just a feather,
a bird is just a bird, after all?