Cracking the Egg


I can remember cracking out of the egg, 
then in a white, eye-stabbing flash, 
I recognized that my parents didn’t know 
much, their power to save me little 
more than words made of air. 
Safety was an illusion, and everywhere 
there were fists and knives. 
Over and over I heard my father say 
I don’t understand the world anymore. 
For him it broke in 1939 and never 
got put back together right. 
In my neighborhood, you could be hit 
by a rock or the water main could break
while the elevator was down, 
and you’d be hauling buckets up six flights. 
I dreamt about that elevator every night 
for fifty years – two women with packages 
speaking Russian, and just before 
they get off, one turns to me, shaking 
her finger. Wrong floor, she says, 
and when I get out, I’m lost in a hallway 
maze. I recognize nothing, the apartment 
numbers make no sense.
I’m in a canyon of buildings on the slope 
of an unfamiliar hill.
I might as well be in the Bronx. 
My parents are waiting somewhere, 
probably frantic by now. 
There’s a man sitting on a green bench 
in a tiny park, and when I ask for directions 
he points toward the subway. 
I get a seat because now it is late, 
but I have nothing to read, so I ride, reciting 
poems in my head as the “lone and level sands stretch far away”.*

*which is the final phrase from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” always good for a couple of stops on the E train.

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Search Party

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My father lost himself on the trail 
one day, when all of us hiked 
in deep New England woods. 
There was my mother and aunt 
and several friends from that summer 
whose faces I sometimes see floating 
in the rain. Some were boys, some 
were women with mouths like owls, 

some spoke only in whispers 
and code. How did he turn 
off the path, stumble 
into the meadow of a thousand flowers? 
How did his voice scrape 
the escarpment in that lonely place? 
His white hair blinded us again 
and again. Still, tearing and dazed, 

we followed his footprints 
in the soft grass. Surely he would wait, 
build a fire and cook for us, hot dogs 
on green sticks roasted almost black. 
He would wait for us and laugh 
and we would sit by the fire and eat. 
We tramped until our feet were sore, 
then sat down to rest by a small stream. 

I made a little dam of sticks and rocks, 
and watched the water pool up 
by the pale green moss. We were hungry 
and lost, with our hands trembling. 
My mother held a basket filled with ash, 
my aunt’s face washed away.
We searched in moonlight, calling out,
crows gathering at the crowns of swaying trees.





The Night My Brain Stopped Working

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It was late, long after the evening meal, 
when everything slowed, then stopped, 
with a wrenching sound of metal tearing 
metal, another object needing repair. 
I had eaten too much, and now, curled 
in my seat, snake-silent, I listened 
as music leaked through the room.
It was ancient, nostalgic in a way that 
bloodied the eyes of sense. 
I might have been eleven when I heard 
that song on the radio, and even then 
it seemed to hang in the air like a rope 
ladder I couldn’t reach, predictable, 
and frayed, but so convincing
I would have slipped out my window 
on a moonbeam or sung from the tree tops, 
ready to surrender, prepared to pack my brain in ice.