Certain Seasons

The Summer Place

“Has it changed?” my brother asks,The place he hasn’t seen for years.“No,” I tell him, “No, not really.”The house still overlooks the harbor,The boats at anchor, trees, the sand.

Still, everything changes, doesn’t it.Trees lose leaves, ice melts, glassCracks, and all of us in time will die,Our bodies like a summer placeWe dwell in for a certain season.

But I don’t tell my brother this,Or how one night I swam aloneBeyond the docks into the deep,The lake a womb, soft, silent,Sweet, to float in fluid darkness,Naked, as if I was being formedIn secret, all of me, my inmostParts, woven into liquid light,Glistening, as if reborn.

The Last Mattress

Yes, it was pricey, the salesman said,but the best investment we could makelast you forty years at least, which thoughI didn’t tell him so put me at 110 withmy husband 3 years older; instead I saidI didn’t plan to be around, though I hopedour children would so one of them mightwish to have it, though then again it cameto me that this last mattress we will buymight be the one on which we die and inthat case they wouldn’t want it, a thoughtI didn’t share with him, that we in fact werebuying our deathbed, a somber thought butcomforting to think that we might die at homewherever home might be by then upona mattress called the Cloud, appropriate itseemed to me, and pricey, yes, but worththe money to sleep to dream … ah, there’sthe rub, for what comes next no one can knowthough I confess, again it seems, that inthe deeper sleep of death, the breath of life,exhaled, returns, becoming one, becoming all.

The Crack

My husband leans to pick it up,a photograph in black and white,a young girl, standing, legs apart,in knee socks, loafers, baseballglove, despite the March trees,stark behind her.

Look at you, my husband says.Put her back, I say: he does,which is when she disappearsbetween the sill and windowframe, slipping throughthe slivered crack, never to beseen again.

Yet, there, in darkness, she existsbeyond the wall where I now sit,and in my bones, my body, blood:As it is with death, I think, whenthose we love drift through the crack,the thin place where two worlds merge,invisible, like softened seedsrooted in our tender hearts,they stir, they sprout, they flowerforth in all that we, the living, do.