I pasted my poems
about mom’s and pop’s deaths
into an e-mail
for my sister and brother.
Pop had just died
and the sense of finality
was still seeking a perch
in my soul.
Both poems
invoked their death beds,
where the three of us experienced
something sacred together,
something I’d failed to feel
when the five of us knelt
on wood in a hallway
and incanted
the mysteries of the rosary
back in the day,
before their divorce,
when mortal sin
was a blackened milk bottle
that befouled
a tawny page
in the Baltimore Catechism.
I hesitated about sending the poems.
My sister and brother
would probably cry.
Was that what I wanted?
A cargo plane lumbered low
over the Hudson,
rattling the house.
Five oblong rocks
that were balanced in front of me
in a zenlike pyramid
tumbled apart,
crashing on the windowsill.
I wondered what the message was.
Were they saying,
don’t burden your brother and sister
with lachrymose words?
Or,
thanks for thinking of us;
we’re dancing the fox trot.
February 12, 2003