she died in the yard
with a wrench in her hand
and her daughter died in the garage.
her sister gets oranges
in the mail each december
and i wonder if she can eat them

sorting through her christmas decorations in the garage
someone triggers a music box and it chimes
fragile and artificial.
and when the last notes slow
and the last note rings it hangs in the air
like dust in sunlight
until the low hum of the fluorescent lights
sweeps it away

he looked like he was stargazing
the way one knee was bent
lying there on his back his
eyes straight up.
and he looked like he was laughing
the way his chest shuddered and rattled
chuckling like
there was a joke up in the clouds.

lights start flashing
white and yellow and red
when the bumper caves over the street
sign bending
rolling down the grassy slope
still flashing
white and yellow and red.
the rain runs
down the windows shattered
cloaks the shaking inside
as it rolls down to stop.

the disdain for her mother
leaches into the storage room
and saturates
all this can go
take it all she tells the junkman
and she waves the air away.
chairs and tables and piles
of turned wood limbs for
furniture
prepared but unattached and
the old man's rusted tools fill a box truck
in the driveway
until the basement floor is a mangled checkerboard
of clean rectangles untouched
by the dust that settled
since he died.
upstairs where she won't get
in the way
the old woman bends in half
lifting planks by one end.
her knuckles arched and white
she tries to turn the front steps
into a ramp

cops stand quiet in the morning
and the air is warm and heavy
hands on their hips
or arms crossed
they stare into the storm drain
when firemen hose off the sidewalk

i cleaved out squares of sod
pried them from the earth
clumped and thick
with soil and left
across the lawn
a wide wet scrape

a mouse just born
slept pink and blind
in a bag of mulch
poured into the garden.
i froze when i found it
studied the beating
of its fragile heart
and skin lined
translucent with veins
its eyes pinched shut like
seashells.
but i knew nothing else to do.
so i turned the mulch back
over the pulsing morsel
and left it there
in the cool cedar

and in the grass
by the highway
is a sweatshirt

          The sun is shining and the gravedigger sits in the seat of his tractor with his head tilted back and the warmth makes the skin on his face tingle. He wears jeans and work boots and the only marker of the solemnity of his occupation is the black of his hooded sweatshirt. Its afternoon on a Friday and he only has an hour before his week ends. He breathes in the sweet smelling air of spring and smiles. Beside his tractor lies an open hole. He waits.
The radio on his belt crackles and startles him. He opens his eyes and sits forward.
“Yah down there?” a voice calls through the radio.
The gravedigger leans to one side and retrieves it from his waist. He presses the button, “Yea, I’m here waitin’.”
“Alright they’re comin’ down now.”
He spots two cars approaching across the graveyard and watches them idly. He leans forward and rests his elbows on the steering wheel. His arms cross at the wrist.
The cars stop near the gravedigger and one of them, the hearse, backs up to the open hole. It beeps  as it approaches.
  Men from the hearse pull a coffin from the back and position it beside the grave. A priest steps from the other car. The gravedigger has seen it all before and watches a bumblebee flit across the grass, bobbing from dandelion to dandelion.
  The coffin is in position and the priest begins the ceremony. No one else arrives.
  “Samuel Gordon Clark graduated from Freemont High School in 1974 and went to work in his father’s moving company, where he worked for most of his life,” the priest reads aloud to no one in particular. The cemetery employees stare at their feet or away.
“He attended Saint Paul’s on Sundays and lived alone. Sam Clark leaves behind his brother, David Clark, of Westborough.”
The gravedigger’s attention snaps back. Sam Clark He mouths to himself. They sat together in elementary school. When the gravedigger was a boy he dropped his lunch in the school cafeteria - spaghetti splattered on the linoleum tiles and milk spreading in a puddle. Ms. Diandria wouldn’t give him more, teaching him to be more careful, she had said, but there was mercy in Sam's eyes. He had shared his lunch. They were not ever close except for that moment, but the gravedigger had always known Sam to be a man of kindness.
  “Why is no one here?” the gravedigger exclaims, interrupting the priest’s continuing monologue.
  The coffin carriers and priest stare at the gravedigger, now climbing down from his tractor.
  “Sam was a good man, I didn’ know he died. Why is no one here?”
“You knew this guy, Jim?” asks one of the other employees.
There is silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” says the priest, and the gravedigger grazes the surface of the coffin with his fingertips. His eyes are glazed.
  “You want us to wait before we let him down?” asks the other employee.
The gravedigger, as if from far away, steps back from the box and says, “No, go ahead.”
The priest watches the gravedigger for a moment, then the other two men as they lower the coffin into the hole, and then he becomes distracted. He realizes that its the anniversary of his brother’s wedding, and he glances at his car. He ought to say something to him. Or maybe send them flowers. He makes a mental note to do so when he arrives home and fumbles with the keys in his pocket.
  The coffin carriers and the priest get back into their cars and the gravedigger and his tractor and the open hole and the pile of dirt grow small in their mirrors. And the sun is shining and the priest considers what to write in the card to his brother and his sister-in-law and what he will make for dinner and the priest goes home and leaves his work behind him.

the railroad track
feels hard and smooth
and cool against his temple
and he remembers for a moment
the radiator
at his mother's house
in the summer
growing up.

swimming ducks & fire trucks

          Bus brakes squealed as it lurched to a stop by the curb. Doors hissed open and a pudgy six year old  boy lowered himself awkwardly to the sidewalk. His father followed behind him. Just as pudgy and with only a foot of height over his son and stiff knees, the man struggled down to the ground as awkwardly as the boy, then waved an absent thank you to the driver as the bus doors swung closed.
  Father and son looked like twins born twenty years apart. Their eyes were sunken and empty, their hands made of clumsy dough and their thoughts were all simple. Their skin was pale from winter but sprinkled with freckles and their hair was orange. They looked like fat leprechauns and were harmless in every way.
          Turning from the bus stop, the father and son walked through open iron gates and along a paved pathway. A city park stretched out in front of them. The sun was warmer than expected so early in the spring and green buds had appeared on all the trees. The air smelled like fresh flowers and food vendors and green grass and all the things a city park should be when winter has come to an end.
The man held his son’s hand and they walked together into the park along the edge of a pond.
“What they doin’?” said the boy, his stubby finger out straight towards a group of ducks in the pond, white tails straight up, waving like feathered sailboats.
“Prolly they eatin’ something,” the man explained, “Or maybe they hidin.’”
His son glanced up at him, his fat face pinched against the brightness of the sun, then looked away, satisfied.
“Ducks got what they call a predator,” the man said after a moment, “Hawks and cats and things, and they gotta get away somewhere.”
Both of their minds wandered.
They passed a young family sitting on park benches with a girl who spoke excitedly in some other language and played with her mother’s cell phone. Her parents sat beside her and read books.
“What she got?” asked the boy, and pointed at the little girl.
“Tha’s a telephone.”
They kept walking.
They bought soda from a vendor in the park and the drinks came in paper cups with ice. The boy sucked quietly at his straw as they walked. The man wanted to feel the coolness of the ice against his lips and popped the top off his drink. He tipped it back too quick and a stumbling line of cola trickled out of the corner of this mouth and down the front of his T-Shirt. He brushed his shirt with his hand, embarrassed, but the dark mark had already set in. The boy stared at the stain.
Drawing away attention, the man pointed to the opposite edge of the park, “Look at the lights, there’s fire trucks down there!” He knew how his son liked fire trucks.
The boy whipped his head around and his doughy jaw fell open. “Le’s go look.”
They crossed the park and the man finished his soda as he walked. The boy carried his cup but was too focused on the growing red lights to drink.
They passed through the park gates and out to the sidewalk, where they could see the trucks clearly. The vehicles were parked around a street corner and firemen and a few police officers were standing around them. They had blocked off traffic in all directions and stood staring up at a fire escape between the third and fourth floors of a brick apartment building. An old woman stood on the iron stairs of the fire escape and wept, looking out at the park and then down at the asphalt and the men. She wore a delicate evening gown and her white hair was pulled back into a tight bow. If she were not alone on the side of the building, she’d look ready to go to an opera or a nice restaurant, thought the man.
  The woman stopped crying for a moment, her face went rigid, and then she tipped forward, over the railing and head first to the ground below.
The crowd gasped as one and turned their gaze away. But the man and his son stood still. They did not move. The man could see her figure frozen in his mind halfway down to the ground, the dress pulled sideways in the wind and her hands open, grasping at nothing. The image stayed for moment longer and he wished she could float like that forever.
Then the curse broke and the man pulled his son away and rushed back through the park gates. The red lights dimmed behind them. Their pace slowed but neither spoke. The man looked straight ahead and felt unable to put his feelings into words or even thoughts and he wondered if his boy saw it happen.
  “I wan’ another soda,” said the boy, looking down into his empty cup.
  But his father was far away. His eyes were on the ducks, now waddling up on shore, quacking absently to each other, and he wondered for the first time if he had a clue what he was talking about.

one of the two men
who started yelling,
running from the back of the bus
smokes now outside
my window
blows out a cloud between
broken teeth

"we stuck on the highway
right now"
he slurs into the phone
describes the location
by the school
by apartment buildings
how smoke billowed from the back seats
smelled just like a plastic plate
left on the burner

vast pile of something
leans over the empty lot
like a hunchback
draped in black tarp
tied down and weighted
and even from afar
looking down from the bridge
its like a tumor

its the way her features slump
when the happy face
slips off
before she's able
to gulp down
the embarrassment

he lost six friends
over there for his country
and he hates pigs.

tracks dash side by side
through the soot
of the train tunnel
like deer through tall grass
on a night with no moon

they step on board all
orange and flashing yellow like
lightning bugs
and sit down together
but have nothing to say

the man much older than
the man on his paper bag

going with her family makes it
different
it's not the same
it's not feeling
like she did
before she says and asks
about blood
on the other girls ankle

she steps past empty
seats to the floor
holding her purse near
peering up at
speaking strangers like
how spiders see the sun

he gestures to the time
but holds his watch hand higher
than could be casual
and leans forward with his fingers
locked
up in interested symmetry