i want this to work, i really do, right around the edges, i want it to bleed, bleed softly, like little petal drops that’ll float up to the surface of things and make it all right, clear these left turns all up.
would it be that bad to wish inside out, have her be me and me she and baby as some three headed hydra wolf of all things and spit and smiles. she climbs slides twice her height and says tada, look at me, look at me, better than any tree.
it’s just a matter of roots isn’t it? of growing, digging into soils, digging into place, staying in place, learning to stay in one place long enough that you can grow into some bark they’ll learn to write on and you in turn will learn to live off the sun.

you want you to say all those things that haven’t been said before. you want to stick a stake through it and let it squirm pinned right to the floor. you want to tell her that it’s been one time too many and she could easily have been anyone.
you want you to get in the car and run it against rails and dividers, sparking all the way to the furthest bar you can get to before it all goes to shit. you want to out drink every single drunk and call them an asshole while you buy them another round.
you want you to feel the steering wheel go tight in your hands and keep the car out of a tail spin.
you want you to feel the gums of your teeth peel back raw and scream your throat dry. you want your eyes to stay open forever and not miss one second of it. you want your hand on her thigh and her tongue in your ear and her hand in your crotch, grinding it into gear.

furnerals are long, tedious and full of grief. they’re an endless procession of procedure, of hearses and caskets and priests and pallbearers and weeping and flowers and goodbye.
there’s a fountain of ritual after dying and before burying. i could not imagine burying my father. someone asked him if he wanted anything.
I want my father, he said, a little boy again, lost in the woods or a department store or somewhere where he thought he could find his way back and now realized he couldn’t. he was suddenly small, not frail, but small and burdened and his clothes too big for him.
at the wake, during the day and the evening, it all seemed easier. my grandmother wept, bursting with each new arrival. my uncles stood around the casket with sunglasses, guarding it. the casket itself was beautiful, a rich and deep red mohagany with easy curves and sharp lines. people came, some well dressed, some out for lunch. in the evening it was all black and sorrow. you could walk right up against it, feel it press itself on your chest, almost not give way. i was in and out, my grandfather’s corpse was ice, my daughter played outside, picking flowers.
the actual service was even more difficult, my aunt could not stand, my grandfather’s sons wept, my grandmother told my grandfather to look, that we all were all here, to come back, look Yianni, we’re here, we’re here, come home, how could you leave me?
we were a procession of twenty cars snaking through island park, oceanside, east rockaway. we drove past his house one last time before leaving for the cemetery.
in pinelawn, competing cemeteries have acres, lush and thick, the size of golf courses. along the shoulders and inbetween them are stores selling tombstones one atop of the other, like vegetable trucks. dull and grey and somber, you can almost sense the near hysterical need to throw out some color.
no one walks the sidewalks.
at the burial we were exhausted. we said good bye at the wake, we said good bye at the church, we were saying goodbye here. we were spent, resigned, submissive. we do not actually watch the casket be put into the ground. and then we were done. and as we all made our way back to our cars and drove one by one away, the funeral director stood alone by the casket of my grandfather. he stood there, watching us leave, waiting. he did not wave, he didn’t even move. he stood there even when we were all gone.

recovering for a week now. he’s not recovering. a phone in the middle of the night, saturday into sunday, while playing cards my grandfather slumped onto his brother-in-law gently, upbruptly, as if reaching for a dropped chip. he was no longer breathing. my grandmother, his wife of 56 years, tried to give him mouth-to-mouth.
15 minutes of not breathing, not recovering. in hospital now, some glimmers of hope, but more or less, no change. he winces at pain, but it’s a reflex, or even worse, an imagination of what his children want to see. my father is there, literally putting his father’s house in order. he swings from resignation and acceptance, to disbelief and despair.
a week agao, when he called, he had said to me, “it’s the phone call i’ve dreading to hear. it’s the phone i’ve been expecting…”
some time between then and now, i had lost everything in the last year i had written. a year gone, and lately it was getting good, rolling into May had some steam. but with a server crash and stupid user error, i could not recover it, only everything from before.
to recover, to salvage, to save, to cherish again, to prize again, to ignore again, to cover from pain, from illness, from abject and senseless randomness. a week later and they say he’s not going to recover, my grandfather in the one in a million shot he pulls out of his coma, will not be the man we had known. i never really knew him, who really knows their grandfather, much less on who was introduced to me when i was late in my teens, nearing twenty.
if, when or ever he opens his eyes, he will have little memory of the man he once was, if any at all. nothing to recover, nothing to forget, nothing left to live for. another ghost for this life parade.
i’m sorry i never got to know you when i should have. i’m sorry i did not devote enough time to you and what you could have meant to me. i’m sorry i let language and shame stop me from doing so.

Moonlight, I was tired. Even waking, the shore was distant and on edge, ghost rim nearing blue. I could make out clouds, finally I heard the gulls and they were swirling, maybe I was meat. Sand in my hair, clumps, my fingers gritty. A face looking in the dark.

She was sleeping, fire crackle along the chin line. Hand beneath hand under cheek under the weight of the sky. Ashes just inches from her hair, embers and flicker. She breathed and I stopped, I had been waking the sea.

Our son sat on the bank, jetty rocks, wishing for storm. He turned, flotsam, hair at all angles. “When did it get so cold?” he asked, “Daddy, when did it get so cold?”

His sister balancing at the edge of waves, crashing. She laughed and he pointed, crouched knees. Blue snow drifts in the sky the sound of dust.

She stirs inches, pushes up against the sand, notices the waves come to our daughter’s feet. She smiles, stretches, leans forward. The hint of teeth at dawn she says, “did you sleep well?”

Had I slept? I rub my face, brittle hands, weathered skin. My son points away from the jetty, clouds running from the horizon, trick of light at the edge. “Yes,” I say, my voice full of sand, “yes I did.” I stand and joints churn, sea salt. “But I’m still tired, you?”

She closes her eyes, breathes, I can hear our son complain about the shells. Edges and grooves, red porcelain and shards. Sea gulls scatter from our daughter’s laughter. I look behind us. Spatter of green blades, tufts for yards, lush embankment cut by sudden stone, then the rest of the world. She opens her eyes, asks, “Didn’t we have children?”

“They’re playing, I think,” I nod towards them. “Terrorizing.”

She sits up, folds her legs as the horizon begins to slowly burn. Hands on hips our daughter scolds her brother for splashing the waves away from the shore.

“At some point,” she says, hair dancing an imaginary crown, short whipping, strands clinging to her jaw. “At some point we will have to own up to them.” Arms resting on her knees, head resting on her arms, my eyes resting on her back, brown and red in the sunrise. “Lay claim to them.”

“The world’s already claimed them,” I say, and my throat trembles from an emptying sky.

The sound of rustling; of thick, bitten nails folding into the darkness. One hand cradles the other before it disappears, comforts it. Wet sand suddenly pressed, sturdy feet.

I knelt beside her, ran hesitant fingers from her hair to her neck to her spine. Our children waged war on each other, armed with the sea, bursts of laughter. In-between the quiet, she leans backs, I steady her. She sighs, “we never stood a chance.”

she’s willfull in ways that would make her spoiled if she didn’t share her food with us. this is what she does now, feeds me as I feed her. and i think terribly some day the roles will be reversed but I won’t be feeding her, just her feeding her old man, broken finally in all places, mind gone, body gone, wife gone, nothing left but a sack of misery for her. will she be changing my diapers.
and it’s not easy to think of another child while this, not wanting to take away from the singularity of this one child, with her pony tail atop her head like some martian and her gut busting laughter. it’s something to be ashamed of, not wanting to take the spotlight away from this child.

i hear it coming again, the broken again, the soft scatter of will never come back together: it holds longer for this sound, longer than for any other, the longest it has ever held.
i’m holding it together with bared knuckles and twine for her and i don’t know what it means when she keeps pushing and not moving back, not budging at all, and its cutting the tendon from the bone to the point where it isn’t worth holding together anymore.
i would have done anything for you, if you held it together for me, if you kept it safe. but no where is safe with you, nothing sacred or holy. anything is a target, as long as it can scratched and pierced and cleaved away. eveything is ripe.
it’s a new kind of something to see your life peel this way.

i had wished for fame and glory, at the very least, a long funeral procession.

you don’t want this
you don’t want this anymore
or you don’t want this for now
have it put up on a shelf until you look at it again
and notice how dusty it’s become.
this thing between us is hardening, i’m in love with another statue
and everything can be broken, can’t you see
we’re breaking
and i want to scream at you to fix this
to put this here and that there
put it all the way it was
to put yourself the way you were
when you were still in love with me