We never went to your father’s river
though far north of here we stood

on a jetty at the end of a normal day
while my mother took pictures of the sky.

Heartbreak is heartbreak at any age:
always too big to fit into a single person.

Pick any shell off this Cape Cod beach
and listen: the sound goes on forever although

every shell’s message is short: “I’m alive
and well” though it always arrives a lifetime

too late or should we assume the life is ours?
Sunset was so big, like a normal day’s sunset

with a bonus sunset for tourists, my mother
had to take another picture and another.

Still the sky wouldn’t fit. And in every photo
you and I stood among strangers like every

group that gathers by happenstance along water
and each held a shell and my mother took

their picture and wrote their names in a notebook
I found years later far from her photographs

and she told them how I laughed so heartily
as an infant people would interrupt my naps

just to watch me wake up and laugh and it
found its way into their heads so that even when

it left a memory had formed around it like a shell
and it was their own laughter saying I’m alive

and well and I wish you all well without your names
in my mother’s pictures with my father at her side

In the stressed syllable of the last month
sometimes I wake in the middle of the night

in the unstressed syllable of the third hour
and feel my heart moving around inside me

as if it is trying to escape when I am
not looking but where would it go?

It’s too early for the scrabble of starling
in the gutter above the open window

The cold air comes in, musical notes
the size of pillows. Like I haven’t

figured out how to dream yet
a window trying to be a wall

What magic changed glass into night?
Then today as the moon rose just after

sunset I found myself in a clearing
mind, thoughts scattered into the thicket beyond.

My heart circles slowly at the edge of the light.
I trust the trees like it trusts the trees.

Like a large cat it shrugs its shoulders
as it walks, like it’s forgetting to take

responsibility for anything like with each step
it’s a step further from what it’s done

Its fur glows at the edge of the circle of light
maybe waiting for me to turn my head

or for another like it to show up at the edge
then from the outside it will come for me

By this river

My river starts as a creek that idles like a train loading up kids at a park
then slides underground, quickening beneath the destroyed black neighborhood

beneath the cheap hotel and its parking lot that was supposed to be a mall
and on downhill past City Hall where it bursts into the open thirty feet below

the police station parking garage then sidles back under the concrete
and into the dark again beneath a parking lot called The Wharf though

it hid the only waterway in the valley so sometimes when I want
to touch the current of my life I feel a parking space stripe that

hand-wide line white or yellow painted over and over for years
until it’s a physical presence not just a visual guide the layers

of paint countable like tree rings when what I want is the rush
and gurgle of what’s just below our pedestrian lives