We name the things we love
the most, and Emma was an
off-brand American Girl doll
our daughter bought at Target
with her Christmas money.
Lydia cradled her baby doll
in her folded arms, wrapped
the plastic infant in a swaddling
blanket, sang a quiet lullaby
in her highest notes and then
laid the baby to rest in a bed.

She also named our dog
whom we tolerated most days
and hated others, who strained
against his leash, dug up the grass
and ate from the trash. Countless
wooden blocks, Matchbox cars,
pillows, sheets, and stuffed animals
left our residence torn or teeth-marked.
We forgave him seventy times seven
until he took the last crappy diaper
off the changing table. We arranged
another home for our ninety-five
pound Doberman/coonhound
mutt named Beans. Our daughter
was heartbroken.  Beansy! she cried,
I don’t want to give our dog away.

On the day we planned to take the dog
to meet his new master, Emma landed
by happenstance in the yard after
a hasty departure from afternoon play.
We found Emma disemboweled,
white fluff of stuffing sticking in the grass.
Lydia sobbed, clutched her love
to her chest. Beans wagged his tail
and skipped around the wireless fence.
Beansy! She cried, flinging Emma
at his head while he pranced
and tried to nip the baby doll’s
remaining limbs, then pressed his nose
against her cheek and licked.

Before bedtime seasons later,
Lydia asked for a song about her
and Beans, and I sang a melody
about a day they ran together
in between the trees and chased
the squirrels, sunlight streaming
through the limbs, and suddenly
she cried, I miss Beans, hot tears falling,
falling, the way only unconditional love
can fall, forgive the one who hurt us most
and resurrect fresh and new in a land
where we forget the hurt and only feel
the hollow where a paw we asked
to shake once fit so perfect.

 

 

 

The body bags reeking of formaldehyde rested on

steel tables like butterfly cocoons

            tucked in a hatchery. 

I unzipped number nineteen where you,

            or rather, the pale yellow,

darkening constellation of you lay waiting.

 

It was the end of the semester. The students had sawed

through your sternum. Your lungs, burned black

from years of cigarette smoke, leaned

against your left arm. Your hand

            (the wrinkled fingers,

nails still pink with polish) twitched when

I pulled the long palmar muscle.

 

Give it a try, I said a little more bluntly than I expected.

            You were kind enough to overlook

my embarrassment, my awkward belief

that someone, a husband or hospice worker,

in the ice-crusted, bare blown season

            of final amends must have loved you.

 

Whoever you were, whatever travail of life

you called your own, even in death

            you were quicker than I was.

I pushed the split halves of your face together

            as if in the cracked chrysalis of flesh,

gone, long gone, I could still find you,

            the lucent beam,

the unmade aperture still shining

in the dust before you were born.

 

 

On the outskirts, in a waste of clay and rock

unearthed when the Interstate went through,

he made his garden—leveled and cleared

the gutted soil. Then in early spring

he brought sacks of sphagnum and guano,

water in gallon jugs, since the spring rains

were never enough, and small bags of seed

with odd names: Early Girl and Black Magic;

Big Max, Straight Eight and Kentucky Wonder.

Testing, holding fast to that which was good.

Summers he worked in the blistering heat

of Sunday afternoons, digging and pulling,

feeding and watering, a hoe for a crosier,

and dirt his sacrament, baptizing the young,

binding them to twigs to help them along,

scion to beans and tomatoes and corn,

Holy Father to congregations of fat squash.

 

Neighbors he never spoke to discovered

on their doorsteps sacks of vegetables,

which of course they were forced to share

with their friends, there was so much.

On the Sunday he died, he set down the hoe,

knelt in a bean row, then fell arms wide

like Absalom before the king. A trucker

found him, skin still hot, but breathless.

When the ambulance came to take him,

tendrils of beans clung to his legs, the corn

lined up in rows, slippery squash laid traps

so that twice the men fell with their load.

And all that night there was whispering

in the fields of ripe corn and soybeans,

among the sculptured trees and neat grass

of suburban lawns, then rain hymned

against our windows, welcoming him home.