Big enough for ten plus me

First Comes Love

When my father still had a job he would bring home key chains
left by diners in the restaurant where he would stand around
in his suit and tie and when he got home he’d give my mother
who’d be reading a book in bed a kiss and he would then hand
the key chain to me and I would all too eagerly toss away the key
to some door I would never think about at five and slip
the key ring over my thumb where the fit is most snug
and the next day my father having left for work my mother
having left her book on a table I would tap the windows
of neighbors and playmates then all of us would run to the empty
lot where we would build ourselves houses from discarded plywood
hang plastic bags for curtains and I would be making mud
cakes inside found bottle caps and I would smile at the grimy
boy who’d volunteered to be my husband and show him two
key rings free of dangling jagged shapes grooved free
of plastic icons and brand names and he would put the ring
on his ring finger and I would tell him to put the ring on my ring finger
the way it is in the movies that scene right before a man and a woman
kiss right before my mother slips her hand over my eyes right
before my father sends me out of the room saying Good night
as if he knew some secret he could never share no matter
how many consolations he brought home no matter how many times
my mother tilted her head up to his that she can accept his kiss.

Closer to where I started

Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill

One slow October Sunday, I run my fingers over the books
on the shelves above my table, like a pianist poised over his keys,
instead, a leap of every hue imaginable, and, of course, a chime:
Roland, yet another discourse on love, is the deep, mellow rumble of moss
green, Haruki’s twisting in hallways the tinny zigzag of all the neons
laced with cream, and another ping. The crooning of Gabriel a slide
keening over the creases of supposed memory, and that one bed you
have not visited, the rose you did not bother to snap off a bush, and yes,

perhaps, a sigh. And I pluck a book I bought months ago
from a secondhand bookstore, where I knelt in front of boxes packed
with volumes long ago pushed to the backs of shelves, giving way
to Octavio, Kazuo, or even Danielle, Dr. Spock and Dr. Seuss – hiding,
huddled, their spines curving, the gold on their cloths steadily losing
their glimmer, later on lost in the moving from one house to another
from whose pastel walls still hung the faint scent of paint. And in my hand,
this book falls open, and I read the pages dotted with yellow,

gray veins, the deaths of silverfish scuttling between tales, and all
the words turn fluid before my eyes, all of us aware of the drawn out
whirs of time, while all the other colors caged in fake mahogany
beams clatter what remains of their gold leaf against each other,
thudding in their places, sending out purrs and whines, and once,
even the beginnings of an aria. I come upon the expanse between 144
and 145, and see there, lying within the speckled tale of a beige-clothed
secretary hell-bent on seducing her lawyer boss, there, here,

a lock of hair, just a pinch of brown curl, fine, translucent if held
up against the afternoon light. And I imagine a child, his steps weightless
one moment, then heavy the next: dimpled feet padding none too gently
on the carpets, the knees raised gingerly, then stepping, again and again,
until he stumbles – discovering the first bars of a giggle – into
the outstretched arms of a mother who has put down the book
she has been reading this one rare, selfish afternoon. Oh, my sweet,
I hear this mother, and see her fingers twirl against the crown

of curls on his head, a few locks tangling with his eyelashes, and now
her mind hops and skips across the room, sliding into drawers,
into covered boxes, searching for the smallest pair of scissors, and one,
one simple snip would do, before the day is over,
before Gaitskill completes her tale, before a girl on her knees eases it
from the dust of a bookstore, a girl who could be doing other things,
instead of imagining herself lovelorn, clasping a brittle book in front of a shelf,
humming an old song, holding up a then-child’s lock of hair against the light.

And doesn't this sound familiar?

Far Too Much, On Nights Like These

Here we sit in a café yellowed with the refrains of old songs, when everyone in this town must be asleep, when people we know have already turned twice in their beds, when people we wish we never knew hear the mutters of their bedmates. See there, even lamplights wink with the rare cars zooming by with roars far too much like an argument we refuse to forget. Don’t you think those explosions of steel and haste wish to quiet themselves, to huddle in the next-to-darkest cul-de-sac, rumbling only when the breeze proves too cold? Don’t you think those tired bulbs high above us want of a stronger wind, that their long, singular limbs could be allowed to creak, before they succumb to their necks badly in need of craning? Look away from walls, my dear, please, ask someone to turn the radio down. We are yet to look at the stars, barely visible, yes, that we could think they have sneaked off for a nap, think this, if only to feel better for ourselves. Look, could you, look—the waning of light reaching us far too late, pinpricks on the sky content (we think) to be without sound. Look, and later, we will have to go to our own beds, ready ourselves with things we have not dared to speak of on nights like this, later still. And I know, my friend, tomorrow, we will talk of how all of these, all of them with their blinking and their disguised whimpers filled our heads with far too much sheen and rhythm, that in the last few moments of our waking, we still touch our hands to our mouths, expecting the few bars of a dead mother’s lullaby, or the sudden, vast glare peeking from between our fingers.

For Kael.