Bourgeon

HUSBAND

A hand
that reaches out

mooring me
from a night of wind-tossed dreams

luring me back to port
this bed our terra firma

the heat of his palm
the only thing that holds me here

like the weight that keeps a tarp
from flying into the storm

WHAT YOU LEFT BEHIND

A closet full of tools
I cannot name.
An industrial-strength vacuum.
Receipts from 2005.
Books you never read.

A 40-foot ladder.
Empty, crusted paint cans.

Years of dust in the corners
we never swept.
Cracked windowsills and peeling paint.
Curtains hung crookedly.
Others never hung.

The bed we bought together.
And the sheets we slept on.
How many years.

Dreams where I sense you
lying next to me
and wake up
saying no, no, no.

Your last name
on every document I own.
The hollow of its vowels.

YVETTE

This name derived from the yew tree
and given to me in 1973
for my mother’s love of French
and a Boricua girl with black braids,
my father’s favorite student
when he taught second grade
in the South Bronx, his refuge
from the draft, a time
when they lived in one room
and a hamper served as his desk.

A name that has passed through languages,
from Germanic into French,
linking me in a chain from Saint Yves
to the girl with Spanish twined in her braids,
to my own brown curls
and a childhood of English.

Yvette, written with a Y
that sounds like an E,
mispronounced all my life,
its first syllable a mystery vowel
on the tongues of friends and teachers.

This name I carry with me, reminder
of a time when lives were defined by war,
when my mother dreamed in francais
and my father taught arithmetic to children,
a time long forgotten in the annals
of our American family
where English came to dominate
pushing Yiddish and German
into the eaves, into the distant sphere
of grandparents. Who knew
that the language of the braids
would find its way back,
that one day I would find Neruda
and grow into Spanish.
It is in me. I contain it.

Image by Jay Wennington jaywennington – https://unsplash.com/photos/OLIcAFggdZEImage at the Wayback Machine (archived on 8 May 2017) Gallery at the Wayback Machine (archived on 4 May 2017), CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62335393

A Kind of Spring

The best time to fall in love

is when you share your greatest fear

with someone who isn’t listening.

There’s a decent chance that

will become your newest

greatest fear. There’s no point

in letting it shift to anger; who

do you think will listen to that?

Close your eyes and run as fast

as you can into oncoming traffic.

Whoever stops to save you, marry

them. If no one stops—let’s be honest,

no one will—at least you’ve

made good time home. When someone

talks about the weather on an

elevator, don’t believe them until

they offer a ring. There are spies

everywhere. When your heart stops,

it probably means you’re dead. Don’t

worry. All winter, your joints

have ached with chill. When summer

comes, you open your windows to

sneeze at the world. There’s war

outside, but no one calls it that. If they

do, consider baking something for

them. The brown haired men with

accents all call you sir, and the women

snap at their children to make way

when you pass. Smile. Say something

soothing. Step into the mud. If you can

think of a way to feel better about all

this, of a way to stop the meanness

of the heart, please let me know.  

Honeysuckle Vine

A honeysuckle vine grew down

the ditch wall, choking the bracken

in the corner below the road. We’d

clamber up the debris and washoff

to pick the flowers, taste the drop

of sweet, more taunt than meal,

then slide our muddy jeans down

to the bottom. Sucking steps took

us over to the road, to play in the pipe

that ran under. If you were tall

enough, you could walk it, hands on

one wall, feet on the other. They

told us it was dangerous, what if

it collapsed under the weight

of traffic? When they tried to send

us home or to school over the bridge,

we said but you said it’s too

dangerous, what if the road collapses? 

Writing Spider

It was black with yellow stripes,

or maybe the other way around,

in a big web by the overgrown

back door we were scared of.

The legend was that if you spelled

out a word in stones nearby, it

would copy it into its web. Hence

the story about the needy pig,

though I always preferred the rat.

We started with Fuck. When

that didn’t take, Shit. Maybe

this was a puritanical spider,

so we tried Butt. Inside, the living

room was quiet because Mom

was dying in her bed. The light

faded until Dad dragged in,

slurring his steps and bitching

about the lack of dinner. After

we peeled potatoes and put them

on to fry, I snuck out in the cool

of the porchlight and spelled Help.