It is poison,
the smooth, slippery stone
at the heart of a peach-pit.
The almond-scent of arsenic lingers
under the nails after the oval breaks
under the pressure of restless fingers.

In the old country the grandmothers
added a peach-pit or two to the pots
of preserves being put up for winter.
Everything needs a little bitterness,
my sweet, it is like salt only harder
to swallow, they would say. No one
will even notice it is there.

They argued over recipes and visitors. My mother,
who was still only a child, stayed on one of the farms.
The summer of the apple-pickings and the jam-makings
and the feuds within the family,
her uncle would take her for long drives
to get away from the fights. She noticed how the farm
smells differed from the city smells, the difference of
traffic-noise and human voices raised in arguing.
Two households stopped speaking.

Mother told me about her summer
last night over tea. We had to talk.
Mother has developed a fancy
for almonds in recent months.
She forgets shopping-bags in the store,
cartons of eggs, a nest of lightbulbs,
a box of tea: fragile things.
We try to interest her in the vulnerable
red baskets of raspberries, frozen cranberries
like small stones or wooden beads, strawberries
mashed with milk and sugar, old
favorites. She will have none of it.

Thursday night she stays up late
to do the ironing. After the smell
of crisped clothes fills the living-room,
she brews herself a tiny cup of coffee,
shaves translucent slivers from the peach
in her dish. The pit is cracked because somewhere
else it is summer, and Mother stares and stares
at the hidden ever-watchful eye inside its shell.
Coffee is bitter and peach-flesh is sweet
and it is the time of night for her to wonder
who she is turning into, where
the smell of almonds and amnesia is leading her, and how
long will this new journey take?

A family overflows with untapped romance
and potential allegories, tiers and tears in the fabric
of its story. Antebellum legends are recalled, vague and hazy
as grapes on a humid summer morning. A prophetic decision
to disguise, a name-change that became a secret. Gunfire
brought things into the focused rooms of tenements
in a ghetto, a baby abandoned as it slept through an
air-raid, slept and lived and died later, when the war was over.

A little boy, the son of a returning soldier, hammered nails into the floor
and looked for a metal chain all through the scrap-heaps
of Stalin’s suburbia. He wanted a bird but when he caught
one under his cap he was so surprised he let it go. His
first wife died of influenza, his second guarded her secret
of jealousy from the two little girls. This second woman
grew up near a river, was sent each summer
to her grandmother’s farm to pick pears and visit
distant cousins. Gossip still lingers of proposed and rejected
marriages, of betrayals and leave-taking. A man’s wife left him for a life of sin
with a missionary. His brother found a mail-order bride
on his third try. The couple moved to away from the city
and the disapproving family to watch the stars.

The children of those loves are coming of age. A boy married a girl
who was half blind. They had two children; then he got run over by a train.
That was also a secret. Two sisters were left. The elder’s hand
in marriage was won in a fist-fight. The second sister
received a dying flower from a stranger, and a love-note on a paper bag,
and memories carefully sown and doctored, for her loves never lasted.
Always, she returns to subway cars and books and dreams of flight and carnage,
and sits through the long times of dark things, writing, for
those who cannot speak of their own loves and lovers spill
the secrets of others’ others.

The women of the Victorian era have gone mad!
It must have been the corsets: the stays were pulled so tight
that bodies shrunk and shrunk and became almost weightless.
One cannot even say that they are skin and bones: they are only bones,
ruined cubist Colloseums—skeletons of their crinolines—
like sun-bleached animal remains in a desert.

Perhaps New York City has unwittingly become
the center of a convention for the spirits of departed gentlewomen
descending like paratroopers from a clouded heaven
to protest for world peace and against loose morals.
Rushing with missionary zeal down into this pit
they cover sin city with a blanket statement of white innocence.

They don’t know where they’re going,
these crazy historic ladies who aren’t dressed for the cold,
who—when the carefully constructed skirts tear
on a thread or spread into an ocean (ice contracts when
melted)—will remember that true ladies cannot swim, and drown.

An epidemic of chocolate
seizes the subway car.
A small old man with a small ‘fantasy
travel’ bag begins by sitting down
and reaching into the pocket of his gray
trench-coat for a foil-covered bar.
Next to him the engineer fishes
a silver chocolate heart out of the side
pocket of his briefcase and pops it in his
mouth. Now he starts unwrapping
a pink one and the next woman in the row
puts away her Crime and Punishment
and finds the bag of truffles in her purse. On her right
a female accountant wrestles with a rustling
Ferraro Rocher wrapper and a teenage
boy breaks off a slat of his Kit
Kat. It’s close to Easter, so the schoolchildren
bring out the eggs and bunnies. Heads
and tails are lost in the fray. No one remains
uncorrupted. Even the conductor forgets
to announce the next stop, too caught up
in a mouthful of peanut butter fudge. Even
the strict mothers and the health teachers allow
their kids a bite from their secret stash. Even
the couple across the aisle has traded kisses for the kind
that stain their mouths and fingers the color of the rest of the world.

We sit on a narrow path
in the park. The asphalt boils, simmers
with summer. No one dares cross
the grid of our legs.

His sense of speech
has suffered in the accident—
the speed-
craving renders a language
without vowels on which to rest
the mouth. His
murmurs are a torrent of hard sounds.
There is no tenderness.

Such a scene is the thin glass
in which the passers-by yearn
to reflect themselves, the conflict
of the hands with what they hold.

So, the tone of the evening is set
in stone. Three stroll down streets along
the sides of parks and buildings. Somber,
a sun sets slowly, lowering and orangelic over
steel and taupe stone.
Three is a magic number, three
is company and two is none and two
walk hand-linked towards the some-
where that the third cannot see. Third
is a third eye or arm and no one’s thoughts
are turning towards home for it is still early.
Slightly north they have white nights but here
the neon and electric signs are colored like candy and if the
third is to get through this walk she can’t stay so close.
Two are twinned and twined in orchestrated majesty of trees
slopping over the park’s low walls and benches beckoning the two
to sit. They keep a step or two
ahead of third because if they want to get past third
base tonight on a park bench away from parents’ prying eyes,
a third friend’s prying eyes will not do,
will not do, so third
concocts excuses and hails a taxi, home,
she says, home; third shows no sign that she has heard
two’s pleas and plays dumb, says that she hopes they had fun,
for she had fun,
so much fun that when the taxi driver pulls away
she does not walk up her own steps, turn the key and go in,
but walks down suburb-streets alone. She trails her fingers on the
stone, on leaves of bushes that have grown waist-high, gets
to the intersection, hears no cars and waits
because it might be her last chance
to cross against the light
and get caught in the light
and get cut down by the scythe of the light
and headlights come and she walks out and
damn slow driver going twenty two
miles an hour stops and doesn’t even honk. Waiting,
green light,
crossing back to home,
back up the block
and steps
and keys into the lock
and click.
Hello
to people waiting up, how was
the evening out,
oh,
it was fine.

She knows how to stand still, that
she knows. The subway car
jerks forward, fast and still
she tries, stands tall as her
old sandals will allow and steps aside
so now no other skin will
brush her skin. A funny thing,
this rush to be invisible and
sorry, to yield to other people’s
hurry, hope that her motive is
yet unrevealed. She steps aside.

From my small summer suitcase I scoop out stray grains of sand,
tallying my losses and my gains of sand.

There was a night we got separated at a concert.
I couldn’t listen to the music’s rasping strains of sand.

You told me we must go prepare for the coming of the storm.
Not a curtain stirred, no thanks for all our pains of sand.

You gave me postcards to make me homesick for places I’ve never been,
photos of little white houses, of country lanes, of sand.

The sea was calm but in my head raged a hurricane.
You, in your god-form, pelted me with stinging rains of sand.

Your body pressed me into the beach.
Now, a scar on my left shoulder is all that remains of sand.

The myth of your heaviness is coming out into the light.
Thoughts of you slowly filter out of my head, leaving thin trains of sand.

This girl of stone is losing her grip on reality…
How can she hope to bind you with her chains of sand?

At first, a child appeared out of the shadows
of non-existence.
Then we let the puppy come
into our tiny circle, and a kitten followed,
more lonely, really, than invited. From

the clouded skies, a resurrected baby
bird fell into our window. Candle-light
flared up, as if by magic, and a cricket
dragged in his gentle creaking through the night.

Thus, our unfathomable circle widened.
Are we all here now? Hardly! Hurry up,
our little newcomer—flap harder, pedal faster,
we’re waiting! While the furniture moves up

the staircases into the new apartment,
we stand aside on empty landings, wait,
for after all, we aren’t so impoverished
as to depreciate these lavish gifts of fate.

Come, join us! we invite the random rambler,
see for yourself the evening’s meager fare
lit by our magic torches—oh, the laughter!
The barking! Squeaking! What a wild affair!

And I, the leader of these carefree dancers
(all unafraid, at least while I’m alive),
I spill my secret to the night’s dark freedom:
this duty stifles me! I’m so afraid... Now I’ve

nowhere to go, so I go hide my face in
my hands. The dog grows old. My orphaned pen
is out of ink. Only the child grows younger
and wants to live, to empathize. But when,

deep in pneumonia, forehead just awakened
from fever, the child whispers—“Please forgive
me, please, for everything, I’m sorry, I’m...”—so softly
it’s barely more than thought—how can I give

anything less? No, I must beg forgiveness
from all of life! I promise not to fail,
no matter what the odds—I will return and conquer
and fight and struggle and at last prevail!

Our flock grows up, soaring through its clear heavens,
secure in its pursuit of life and bliss,
joyful, uncaring, unaware of troubles,
oblivious to all that is amiss.

The cricket and the bird stay in our dwelling,
while we—the child, the dog, the ashen cat and I—
descend into the yard. Our brave performance
dazzles and obfuscates the untrained human eye.

We are the stars of life’s town fair. And, dodging
the puddles with our load of milk and bread,
we think—who needs this fame? It’s all so easy,
laughably effortless. And still, we plunge ahead.

September days, warm weather, sniffling breezes;
commuters shuffling through slow-turning stiles,
all rushing from their labor or their studies,
shower us with the golden coins of smiles.

When the street is dark, I walk holding on to the walls.
When the walls are dark, I walk holding on to the streets.
Walking on walls in the dark, I am holding the street.
Walls hold streets, I walk in the holding, dark.
Holding the street, holding the walls, I walk in the dark.
When I hold the walls in the street, I walk into the dark.
Dark holding: walls and streets and walking.
When darkness is holding the streets, walls walk.
When I am dark, walls are dark, streets are dark, holding me.