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Easter
For Julia

Michigan is all water and trees;
they keep up wind that feeds
reeds and willows,
the low, shifting guardians
of the unspoken,
they are gargoyles, lakeside.

This current hushes
the dangerous, important
things we might say,
makes memories more
than they should be.

We pass plates today
as we have over the years,
talk about work
and the stock market,
and make jokes that mom
does not understand.

We hold our lovers' hands
under the table, each of us
seeing in the other
what we are sure no one knows.

Later in the dark,
we will swear and cry
and our lovers will listen
to the needs and regrets
she will never hear.

Tonight, she will stand
in the wind, out on the deck
in cotton nightgown,
watching the water;
she will remember
her daughters' faces
at three and six,
observe wind
changing direction,
as willows submit,
heads bowed in the dark.



Postcard

Of all the things I might recall
about the day my father left,
it is the vision of my mother
running out of the restaurant
after she broke the news to me,
and of an A & W fish sandwich
half eaten on a bone white dish.

She left the two-person table
that wobbled and sat on a bench
outside the door, waiting for me
in the moment before sandwich,
plate, and shaking foundation
froze its own frame.

These images remind me of the postcard
Of the red rock mountains at sunset
I picked up at a diner on my first trip
to Nevada to see my father
ten years later, for the first time;

I was secretly desperate to keep alive
the deepening desert sky outside,
to preserve the feeling of sweeping winds
carrying me in their season-less eyes.