little brother

  Eva's House, Left, South Lubec Eva, Lost     I   Tied tight to my feet, my running away shoes were laced hasty, one eye hole open and the tongue slipping to loll toward my ankle.  I’d watched Eva   come out of her house and wait for me, or at least I thought she was waiting for me, the way she stood and looked my way with the sun in her face, her hand   a visor.  Later I’d come to know her secrets, her losses, mainly her youngest daughter, still a new baby, shopped off to be raised by strangers while she was away having   electricity jumped into her brain.  She had the kindest face and the most vacant eyes.  Like she was able to split herself in two, a bilocating saint.  She was there and   she wasn’t there.  She talked with a heavy tongue.  I have cookies.  Would you like a cookie?  You look like you could use a good cookie.  And for a moment I forgot ...

  How You Care for the Dead Tells the World Everything  About Who You Really Are   Somewhere, perhaps among the living, a bell began pealing, insidious, solemn, obsessive, and there was no one left to tell the echo from the final stroke.                                            D.   Nurske                                            A Path in Grace   It seems like your greatest betrayal, the final abandonment   there’s no coming home from. All along you allowed her   to believe you’d be beside her in the e...

  A Shame                                When you are tired or terrified your voice slips back into its old first place and makes the sound your shades make there…                                              Seamus Heaney                                            The Loaning   What’s yellow of the last of summer’s mid-August is goldenrod, or the odd lily.   And I’d like to be the one ...

  Indian Pipe or Ghost Plant s. lee photo Blessings That was as much hope that the purest and saddest were prepared to allow for.                                                             Seamus Heaney                                                           An Aisling in the Burren   I won’t go to hell today, I need to leave Dante and his guide climbing   and ducking the demons that fly b...

  water/sky birdbath collage Stop, stop     Death’s dark door stands open day and night.   But to retrace your steps and get back to the upper air, that is the task, that is the undertaking.                                            Virgil                                            The Aeneid (II.172-177)     They’ll be no break in the clouds today.   Likely the night will hum,   a full-length flatbed on the highway going north to the papermill,   coming south from the papermill.   I l...

A Certain Cartography Leads Me These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yarn-goods.                                                                                                 Elizabeth Bishop                                           ...