All week they’ve stolen her daughter’s face,
rolled it up, delivered it in late editions
to each waiting neighbor, all of whom
are quoted passionately as saying,
 “She comes from a good family.
We don’t understand.” 

Neither does she, hiding behind 
her just-washed curtains,
the family portraits eyeing her disgrace.
Reporters ring the bell,
wait for her good manners
to reclaim her. 

It is time for school, her daughter
appropriately housed
behind evenly spaced bars,
her unsure lips as complex as fingerprints.
Even this is a photographic exhibit
with the wrong captions.

Behind her 8x10 door,
the good mother develops 
polite excuses, snaps
small portraits of her family’s past
with black-and-white eyes,
pastes them behind the present.
She has forgotten how to pose,
where to focus her attention. 

In that other studio,
her daughter will cry
without her,
her young silhouette striking 
and beautiful even there,
her eyes negatives of what was.

Meanwhile, on the front porch
the photographers raise 
their lenses, adjust their stares.
Soon, the good mother will 
open the door, look away toward the edge
of the frame—there,
where she needs to step 
out of the picture.

-Wellsboro, PA 6/03

All the safe, small towns,
gas streetlights silly in retrospect,
proclaim surprise. What else
can they say when their children’s
blood stains the school tiles: but the cornstalks
are beautiful here? The hunting is good?

The wide, oak-lined streets empty out
from all but spectators
shooting cameras,
murder and media sole companions
in this former tourist-attraction for tranquility.

Eventually, summer skateboarders
will again hunt back roads, 
barefoot teens will dive
into abandoned swimming holes,
grade-schoolers at bat will boast 
that they were there, that day, 
in the hallway, the cafeteria, 
the next classroom over.

On the hottest day
when a small town’s boredom sizzles
into the limbs of its children,
they will wonder what it was like
to aim, to hit the target
fast and accurately,
to explode in the unfamiliar dazzle 
of bright city lights.

Columbus, Ohio; 1993

This is a poem I didn't write
but caught on the fly,
fumbled, words sputtering
like an exhausted firefly
overcome by the pyrotechnics
of the Fourth. The smell
of words lingers.

At Whetstone Park fire
works almost as well 
as words ignited in near-
dusk by families on folding chairs
waiting for something,
a drive-in theatre of lights
with no screen. 
 
And these relatives 
I'm just beginning to know
because my father died,
and this man I just married,
all write the poem, spark
the concatenations that rise
into my ahhh!

The sharpest among us forgets
whole sentences, remembers 
the lives gone out—in our group of five:
three fathers, two mothers, one brother.  
Her old words swell, 
minute explosions, articulate
across our graying sky.

This is the telling of time,
tickings so loud or soft
we forget we are listening
for what we've lost:
the blank peaceful black
before and after grief, joy:
the definitions of when to begin.

"Fireworks," someone says, 
"determines the time of dusk."  
Someone else argues, "It's mosquitoes." 
Our watching makes the sky crackle. 
In our small circle of chairs, 
we slap and smile; 
we listen.