at andrew's-- chadd's ford, pa Eighteen Squares of Light Pentimento n. the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over It’s suddenly a memory now, made possible because of the windows behind me, that a car has gone through its own mirror, emerging a fraction of a second later, the way every reflection figures in the light of redundancy and glass. Imagine this: the second square in from the left of the sash, second row up, seated and solid between the unmachined muntin coped by hand in around 1810, the glass has seen and been seen through for these last two hundred and more years: bird and person and bear and doe and fox and boys and girls going off and coming home from all those wars and houses that rise and that fall down into the open cellars of themselves, soothing the sore throats of the neighborhood where old windows and nails and broken frames and
Paper Name Anything is a story we tell ourselves about silence. Tommy Orange Wandering Stars If our names are written down before we are born for sure I mis- heard or mis- understood and I loosed the unlawful one on you. I put my lips to your lips and whisp- erd, and you, being so in your skin mute and new couldn't speak otherwise. And so you flew through almost two decades with the mistaken name in my sinew, and it beat its three-piece meter in cadenced bass breaths: IN OUT IN in blood & air to the tubes to my lungs and muscles. Later, out of wind from my climb (all mothers are out of breath from their climbs) I can see you standing f
For Frances—Who Lately Found Her Granddaughter Alone in the Back Bedroom Gone Gone Forever – Somehow, when you take flight I am not watching at least not close enough but the green that eased off the field between me and you is graced with lupines and wind raises phrases in the grasses only you can hear somehow when you take flight the green is the light we are both reaching for and somehow it is a jesus in each of us
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