As my family walked to church
my younger sister jumped
into the road and a Ford leapt
into her side.
 
When the driver emerged,
my father unfurled his arms,
leaping to the man’s lapels
and tossing him to the ground.

My father was softly pinched 
into a police car as my sister 
waved from the ambulance.
                        

My fever hovered over
long evenings in the hospital
and the nurse said 
you’re going to be here forever –

in clean linen sheets but gasping 
with my books beside me but silenced
unlike the boy in the next bed over
whose brain was erupting,
who cried when they moved him.

Released and returned to school 
I got on the wrong bus –
the lip of the door sealing
and the lurch forward –
afraid the right bus would never come.

Furious rounds I traveled
to streets I didn’t know,
clasped in my waiting.
                        

We sat & sat at the table, scrambling 
for space as the kids expanded
and fled, a parade of conversations
jostling, tucking a wing of graying hair
behind one ear as the chairs wobbled beneath us.

We were commiserating with a touch of envy
about how some lives end in the hall of fame
but you have to know what you really want
to live happily ever after. 
I was wearing a baseball cap
to look athletic. I have a twisted neck
from staring at old books. 
 
We head to the pond. 
If I yell in these woods,
the sound is partially absorbed, but  
in a book sound escapes
every time you open it.

A crow in the garden flounces over a row of beets;
then complaint, then flight.

The kids come back: on their trip, Elizabeth was the one
afraid she had undertipped, ordered the wrong coffee,
clearly, my child
while the rest stretched into their long lives,
camping, swimming, shouldering their children.