All it takes is something familiar: the shape of a 
hand or a stranger’s eyes in the sudden light of 
a theater when the movie ends. Then, something 
deep in memory’s birthwood calls me back. 
The past is my first language, a speakable grace.

On summer nights in East Rahway, our fathers 
sat on front porches in worn t-shirts, their 
calloused hands wrapped around beer cans as 
the last stars took their places like nail-heads 
on a dark and holy board. Inside, our mothers 

sang as they washed the dinner dishes, and we 
went to sleep with the easy grace of children. 
All of our grandmothers spoke with accents, 
rolled their stockings down to their ankles like 
nylon UFOs, and people shouted at them when 

they spoke, enunciating carefully, as if our 
grandmothers weren’t only foreign but deaf. 
Different from the beginning, we were the city’s 
middle children, never as tough as the kids from 
the projects, and only half as cool as the kids who 

lived behind the high school on the other side 
of town. Cut off from the rest of Rahway, we 
lived between Route 1 and Linden Airport, in
a place where sleep was rubbed out of night to
the sound of trucks stumbling over potholes 

and propjets taking off on runway number three. 
Safe in our own society, we lived a little religion 
of unlikely saints whose blood offerings were 
elbows and knees that scraped like autumn 
leaves on the sidewalks. In East Rahway, hardly 

anyone died or went away. Those were the days 
before we knew what dead meant. But when 
Mr. Malone, who lived in the corner house, 
did it, the bagpipes wailed and skirled for 
three days in his living room, a hundred octaves 

higher than all the blades of grass we ever 
held between our thumbs and blew against – 
a different kind of party. There were no soccer 
games, no little league, no one drove us anywhere. 
We walked to the corner store and hiked down 

Lower Road to Merck’s Creek, the mosquitoed 
water stained even then by chemicals we couldn’t 
name; but, oh, the bright and oily rings that spread 
above the stones we skipped like shivering circles 
of mercury. There were forests then, across the 

street, and deep. We were wood nymphs and
Druids, foreign legionnaires led by my cousin 
Eddie. Soldiers of whatever fortune was, we 
followed into the hymned and scrawling weeds – 
the underbrush belled by our footsteps, trees 

tuned to prodigal birds. We were Arthur and 
Guinevere, Merlin, Morgan, all the knights, and 
one Rapunzel who lost her hair in a bubble gum
accident. We did things differently then, believed 
in summer’s synonymous sun, December’s 

piebald light, white-maned and glistening, the 
moon above us, cloud-ribbed in semi-silhouette. 
The past falls like water from winter boots. 
Merck’s Creek, darker, dirtier with new pollution, 
moves more slowly. The streets, once so wide 

and willing, are smaller. And the forest is gone, 
the initials we carved lost with fallen trees, 
the green spirits laid to rest beneath a block of 
factories. But, still, if you cross Route 1 on 
a night overworked with summer stars, and 

stand on the corner of Scott and Barnett, you 
will find our fathers there. Kents and Winstons 
burn, beer cans shine in the baritone heat. Our 
mothers and grandmothers sing, ghostly soloists, 
eggshell voices – reedy, thin. And we are there,

lips pressed smugly on chocolate cigarettes; our 
pockets ring with Pez candies. Listen! A child’s 
voice calls Excalibur into the night, those old bones 
still in the road – skull and neck, a few vertebrae 
that we tossed like dice to tell our future. 



(From What Matters, Welcome Rain Publishers, 2011)