Rockland, 1995


Fly balls traveled with beautiful urgency. For entire afternoons 
I tossed batting practice to Ryan LeBlanc whose drives to deep center echoed 

with metallic authority through our empty high school stadium. The Red Sox 
were still failures, seventy-six seasons without a title, but at various moments that year
 
everything made sense. Ace of Base rocked the radio as I folded boxes 
in the dingy backroom of Themis Pizza for a much needed twenty dollar bill. 

At the Hanover Mall Rene Ambrose took off my baseball cap 
and placed it upon her perfectly combed brown hair.  

We wandered from store to store sharing a soft pretzel dripping honey mustard 
on the checkered tile floor. It didn’t matter that Ryan’s brother, local amateur boxer, 

spent the summer in jail for assaulting a cop in the Burger King parking lot 
because on his family’s mantelpiece was a Golden Gloves trophy 

which served as proof not everything turns wrong. At The Candlepin bowling alley 
a pin setting machine caught fire as Rene and I tied our swirling 

red-brown bowling shoes. I still do not know what I meant 
when I said, At least we still have each other, but as we waited for the fire truck 

such words seemed to capture an incredible truth even though 
a year later Rene started to date high school pole vaulting sensation Tony McSherry.  

Ryan passed his driver’s test on the second try. We felt liberated 
in his mother’s Ford Escort which coughed smoke every time 

he shifted into third gear. In late September the girl’s varsity soccer team 
formed a wonderfully long line at Dairy Queen. I imagined Rene wearing 

blue soccer shorts, her flawless white legs with goose bumps 
in the early autumn chill. Ryan drove to Reid’s Pond so we could eat our sundaes 

by dark water and listen to the Red Sox who trailed the entire season 
by three in the ninth. Six months before the Rockland baseball stadium 

would be bulldozed into a parking lot, two years before Ryan’s brother 
was shoved into a police car for selling drugs to minors, 

we stared at the lights of our town off in the distance--unable to see 
the Episcopalian church which had burned down in May 

or the dark shadows of the abandoned shoe factory on Liberty— 
seduced by the glow of each passing moment.





Another Perfect Sunrise


Even if a daily sunrise occurs 
in the remote sphere of God's Heavenly Kingdom  
the thousands of angels residing there 
would not understand it in human terms.
Certainly another pink-orange dawn
again lighting their cloudless sky blue 
would be different from that particular sunrise in North Conway 
on the second Thursday of July in 1989
because my mother, who seldom got up 
before eight, woke before any of us
and put on her dirty blue bathrobe
much different from the whiteness of a heavenly robe, 
and because she had to walk on the wet wooden deck 
of the house we had rented  
for the last seven summers
to sit in a uncomfortable wrought iron chair,
and because on that particular morning several clouds 
obscured the sun from view. But what made it most different 
is that this was only five years after 
my brother's death and that when we started vacationing 
in North Conway he was still alive, 
and he, rather than my mother, 
would have been the one to get up in the lonely darkness. 
She could not stop missing him 
and that is why my mother clung 
to such absurd ideas as angels who somehow understand 
human responses and can be persuaded 
to briefly stop braiding each other's waist-length hair 
to help lessen our perplexing grief,
and why, as my mother looked upon the few threads of light 
that suddenly split the clouds, 
she sensed the presence of something 
I have never sensed
and gripped the arms of her wrought iron chair so tight.





The Anatomy of Birds


If ever God's heart was drowning 
in fifty gallons of despair, I would mention 
the anatomy of birds as a flashlight 
to shine through His heavy grief. 
Avian Pallium, I would say, and God, 
even if lost in the agony of a thousand 
thunderstorms would remember the kindness 
of this gentle bone,  
how it protects the Cerebral Cortex
like hands wrapped around  
a small snowball.  

God would remember, upon hearing Anterior 
Air Sacs, how once He took the last 
embers of creation to give each bird 
a small breath. I would say Synsacrum 
for the tender way God fused 
their Vertebrae. I would point 
toward a lone crane and whisper 
Syrinx, for sparrows barely above 
the sleeping trees, Fovea.

If ever an ocean of God's teardrops
fell like boulders from a gray-black sky 
each of us should recite
bones found in the generous wings 
of birds, Alula and Scapula, Humerus 
and Ulna. We should repeat the names of each 
tiny gland, Uropygial, Malaclemys, 
our recitation not stopping 
until God's swollen heart had risen 
from its midnight of sorrow, until God could once more 
hear His birds singing, so far in the distance, 
even as they fly against His terrible wind.