​Crickets


The sound of crickets is the distance
between our childhoods: even one
of those saws in the dark keeps you awake,
while it sings me to sleep, and even more
pushes me up through the summer leaves
into the green dreams of youth and clarity,
when my belief in vision was harder
and stronger than the rocks in the field.

Days in the summer of 1984, I entered that field
to sit by the lake where dragonflies
strafed the reeds, mosquitoes punctured
flashes of sunlight and mallards overhead
dragged their shadows through the water.

I thought, this is how a mind works,
even in the dark, when bats come out,
feeding on what floats to the surface of a day,
because that is what night is:
the thin line at the top that bends light
and changes everything. For that summer
my best friend died and became
another rock buried in a field, another spot
where crickets, all night, hack, and saw,
and cut away the differences between us.





The Unearthing


With a deep knowledge of the earth,
Grandfather cracked open simple stones
revealing to me the crystals inside a geode.
He flashed black lights on coarse rocks
till their hidden radiation fluoresced
with unearthly oranges, reds and blues.
In the basement museum he displayed
petrified dinosaur teeth, Herkimer diamonds,
amethyst and fluoride, telling me a little about each,
the secret ways they were shaped in the earth.

Meanwhile, under his cap, the disease eroded his memory,
carried off particulates of knowledge, his mind
passing slowly away like a geologic age,
replaced with fossils, traces of things forgotten:
where he left the car, the sweater he wore yesterday,
his address, my face and grandmother’s face,
under his eyes, all hardening into nondescript stones
and dropped down a hole so deep in his mind
none of our names could be unearthed.