I imagine this again and again: on a raft, in a passenger car, I’m crouching or sitting and there in the creek, beside the tracks, I see an object but can’t tell what it is, a thing obscured by the murk of the water, the speed of the train. A large rock, or a fallen tree, or broken concrete with rebar, or a wooden box. I don’t want to think it could be a body.
Family Scripture (and other poems)
It’s better not to know.
If you knew, how would you stand it?
It’s better not to cry.
If you start, how would you stop?
Dance, Rockette
She’d been an older mother, almost forty—her pregnancies had been classified as “geriatric”—which was why the children were only twelve and a half months apart, there hadn’t been time to waste.