The stewardess gave me – I had just

turned six – a white eyelet sweater.

It was late November, 1968. ‘This is America,’

she told me, ‘cold, not like the West Indies.

One needs a jacket of some kind here.’

I trailed off.

The white southern businessman needed

to talk. He wanted a story, or more

precisely, he wished to understand how

he came to be sitting next to me in first

class on that otherwise ordinary Thursday.

…

This morning when the doorbell rang

and a man stood outside my door,

I thought he must be official,

the doorman has sent him up unannounced.

So I opened my door to him,

smiled and said: Good morning.

He was a slender man in his forties,

blue eyes, with a part in his off-blond hair.

He kept both hands in his pants’ pockets.

They were gray suit pants. For a minute

he said nothing, giving me time

to accept him as he looked past me

in search of – I’ll use his words –

I need to speak to your employer,

to someone who lives here.

…

After he left – he had come

about new windows – I remembered

the southern businessman. His litany

of questions. His need to place.

The persistence with which he asked,

You aren’t a lawyer, are you?

His curiosity had made me laugh,

so I told him everything,

described everything, including

the first airplane I ever flew in.

The one that brought me here.

…

It’s been wanting to rain all morning

and without the sun subtracting

blue sky suggestions, it comes down easy

against leaves, sinking

in between blades of grass

as I enter to close

wide-open windows

only to find myself leaning

forward, out, into this home.

*

In this bed, a man on his back, his eyes graying blue.

It is hurricane season. Sparrows flying in, out the wind.

His lips receiving. He is a shore. The Atlantic rushing.

Clouds opening in the late June storm. This,

as before, in the embrace that takes all my heart.

Imagine his unshaven face, his untrimmed nails, as all

The hurt this world could give.

*

Gnaw. Zigzag. The end of the alphabet buckling floors.

How to come up?

The blue-crown motmot cannot negotiate narrow branches,

but then her wings give way, betray struggle,

intention broken off in puffy cumulus.

I wished him inside again.

Touched him. Feathery

was the refusal,

drawing together what thirsts. His whole self holding me in,

we slept on the edge of overrunning

_____________________________

with parakeets nesting

in porch lights and dying hibiscus covering the ground.

(a dry season choked in dust, etched cracks in dirt roads,

children down from the hills in the sweat of night

to steal water.

Plastic containers in those hands,

over the gate to my house. I lie here, my head

on the prime minister’s belly, listening: urgency

swallowed by worried stillness

enveloped again by movement, before, finally,

the outside tap turns tentatively on –

*

Ignore your own devastation and it doggedly shadows, resurfacing

across the first version, the flat world, forcing you within

the real conversation you hold with yourself.

If abandoned rage asks, Who should answer for this?

Say, the very blood of our lives eats composure up.

Or milk on the tongue tasted rude, unfortunate. And hunger

awoke as human. On all sides, riddled. Broken

and broke against. Inside, by earlier years, shook.

I am remembering the hours lived in, steep steps

angled, and the going up and down burdened before

the certain hand went out, pushed –

if only –

or to go again, doing nothing

to stop hurt releasing a body out. We live through, survive

without regard for the self. Forgiving

each day insisting it be forgiven, thinking

our lives umbilical, tied up with living with how far

we can enter into hell and still sit down for Sunday dinner.

*

(then the blond arm, taken

aback, encircles my waist, the long, ready-to-wear

appendage, soothing over

The day I am at peace I will have achieved

a kind of peace even I know suggests I am crazy.

But, as it will be how I survive, I will not feel so.

*

When she arrived

she felt composed. Someone called her. The voice broke,

trying to bridge or to remember. The voice that called

was no other than her own.

*

Did they take a vein from her thigh to mend her heart?

She pulled a pant leg up. Her face, undressed, was more interesting.

She was grinning. How old do you think I am?

Still she wanted to die. And there, her reflection

facing her. It motioned as if she were alive.

Her photo was in her purse.

*

Da da daa. She repeated,

Da da daa. She wanted to leave.

I got a lot of life for a dead woman.

She laughed. She was laughing. She was lying. The rain.

*

Later in a bar with a friend. He muses: There we were,

two children really.

Later in a bar with only one question. It begins: If we had had

the child – It ends: could he have shielded her from herself?

Later in a bar, he has had a few, he begins: mad, madder than

He ends: Miss. Miss. Understand.

His friend answers only because he thinks he must

but a touch would do – It’s a shame. He says: A shame. A shame.

No one is sad to have saved himself.

He lives. And what is better than a cold beer?

Even with her wet eyelash picking up dust she must realize.

*

Or did she (not he) simply stretch out? She

in reality at peace, face down. Laughing still.

Her body twittering like a machine.

Hard to keep flesh in the mind’s eye

when the story

is a mountain range quaking.

Once Liv thought pregnancy would purify.

Ersatz  of freehand sketchiness   of hollow form

anonymous    delineation of bone

of moody hue dipped in fetal city   oh so neatly laid

within Liv  estranged interlacing   that she is

How not to smile out loud?

Erland

how not to? when in utero a fetus heartbeat bounces off.

scanned vibrations of this newer soul making a self whole.

how not to? as the chilled gel brings to the screen inked in.

black and white. glimpsed. scrutinized. joy.

Erland

considers this ersatz image. abracadabra and like. so like.

so liked.

by him whose blush tinges with alleluias. so close to life. his

dried lips licked repeatedly.

He’s breathing within. but breathless in the red of the ribbon-

cutting. a sunrise.

tickling giddy goodness extracting arrival. here. here is a slip

of fate from a touch that felt right all over.

Erland

in the volumetric space that is him and spilling to become sun-

drenched. impossibly tender.

turning to Liv, love, stands in her way in tinted glasses wanting

slowly to be

received by her who feels survival. its pencil movements.

even as she moves through the still traffic debating.

assuaging doubt.

What do you mean, are we sure?

Just because we are pregnant doesn’t mean we have to have it.

What would we be waiting for?

I don’t know … to be sure?

Liv, are you saying you don’t want to have this child?

No … no, I am not saying anything. I mean I am just saying we could still think about this a little. We still have time.

Time for what? That is what I am not understanding …

Time to understand how completely, completely changed our lives will be.

Well … sure it’s scary and things will change, but we will have our lives plus the baby. Others have done it. How are we so different?

Look, if I can’t talk to you about this, who am I to talk to?

I’m sorry I’m happy. I think it will be great. I don’t know what else to say.