Collaborative Verses

The water pulls back like a bedsheet
and leaves its small cargo:
a whelk shell the color of weak tea,
kelp collapsed in wet brown commas,
one child's flip flop, size six, no child.

My father taught me to read these leavings,
how the tide writes and unwrites the same page
twice a day, patient as a monk
copying what he already knows.

He is three winters gone now.
I stand where the ferry groans against the pilings
and the gulls argue over a crab claw.
The cold comes up through my boots
the way it always did, honest and slow.

Somewhere out past the shipping lane
a freighter slides toward Asia,
its wake a long white sentence
no one will ever finish.

I pick up a stone with a hole worn through it.
Good luck, he would have said.
I put it in my coat and don't look back
at the water giving all its secrets away
and taking them back, and giving them,
and taking them back.

afternoon light
on a chipped enamel cup
someone left behind

the water still
holds the shape of a hand
cooling by degrees

The market closes. Heat leans on the stones,
and via dei Coronari empties out
like a lung. I carry paper bags
that smell of figs and warm wax paper,
the fruit so ripe it bruises at a touch,
and I am thinking of your hands,
how they would lift one gently, thumb
against the split skin, patient as a man
who knows the sweetest thing is always
the one about to fall apart.

We met in a courtyard where the laundry
hung between two windows like a truce,
white sheets breathing in the afternoon.
You said the light in Rome is vulgar,
too much gold, too much insistence,
and I loved you then for being difficult,
for wanting shade. Some nights I still
hear the bicycle chains below, the squeak
and click, the small machinery of people
going home to someone, or to no one.

What I mean is: love is not a cathedral.
It is a kitchen at eleven, cold tiles
under bare feet, the kettle's private
argument with steam, a plum stone
left on the sill. It is the way you fold
my sweater wrong and I say nothing.
It is the fig, split open in my palm.
Eat it before it spoils, you tell me,
and so I do. The juice runs down my wrist,
sweet and mortal, and the evening
turns its slow coin over in the sky.

Snow on the temple stair.
No one climbing,
no one descending.
The bell hangs in its beam
like a held breath.

A crow shifts its weight.
The rope sways once
and is still.
Whatever I came to ask
the cold takes first,
then gives back smaller.

The time clock coughs its punched-card truth at six,
and Rosa trades her coat for apron strings.
Her hands know grease before her mouth knows words,
and the fryer hums a hymn the morning brings.

Across the avenue, the courthouse steps
collect the same cold copper from the light.
A woman climbs them holding papers, straight
as rebar, though her knuckles hold on white.

The bus exhales. The platform fills with breath
of workers, wool and coffee, salt and rain.
Somebody's child recites the alphabet
against the window, fogging it again.

The foreman counts the crates. The judge counts days.
The landlord counts the rent. We count the hours.
But down on Kedzie, in the laundromat,
the dryers turn like slow and patient flowers.

And Rosa, wringing water from a rag,
looks up and sees the woman on the stairs,
and neither waves, and both of them keep working,
and something in the ledger shifts and squares.

The north face keeps its slow green script,
a lettering of ash and rust
that winter wrote and frost has kept,
the rain its only reader now.

I lean my palm against the grit
and feel how patient stone can be,
how moss prefers the shadowed slit
where sun forgets to fall. The oaks

above the hedge hold up their dark
ungenerous branches, blackbird-bare,
and every lichen is a mark
the cold has patience to prepare.

November fog comes up the lane
and thins the poplars one by one;
the wall grows vague, then vague again,
until the field and sky are none

but grey on grey. I turn my coat
and mind the stile, the muddy rung,
the single robin's single note
that keeps the silence well begun.

the kettle ticks
as it cools. steam thins
to a ghost of heat.

outside, the frost
has made its slow
arithmetic on the glass.

I count the coins
of afternoon, one
by one, and spend them

on nothing. the room
goes the color
of weak tea.

The morning after the storm
the beach is a rummage sale
of kelp and bottle caps,
a single blue flip flop,
one crab shell small as a thumbnail
the color of a bruise healing.

My father used to walk this stretch
with a bucket, picking up what the water
did not want. He said the sea
gives back everything eventually,
just never in the shape you lent it.

I kneel in the wet sand.
The tide line is a sentence
written and rewritten,
and I am learning to read it
slowly, without asking
for the meaning to hold still.

A gull argues with the wind.
The rain comes back,
soft at first, then serious,
and I let it soak my coat
the way he would have,
standing here, saying nothing,
letting the weather do the talking.

The hallway clock still keeps
its small brown cough at four,
though no one wakes to hear it.

Your coat is on the hook.
I have not moved it.
The wool has gone soft at the cuffs
where your hands went in and out
ten thousand mornings.

In the drawer, your glasses
folded the way you left them,
one lens smudged still
with the print of your thumb.

Grief is not the storm.
It is the tap left running
in a room I forget to enter,
the kettle I fill for two
and then remember.

Outside, the snow does what snow does.
It covers the walk.
It does not ask permission.
It does not apologize.

I shovel it anyway,
because the neighbor's boy
has to get to school,
because the salt is there in the bucket,
because the morning is cold
and I am still here
to feel it.

A cup cools on the sill, its steam undone
by morning air that carries salt and tar
from somewhere past the rooftops, where the sun
is still a rumor, not yet risen far.

The kettle ticks as metal cools again.
A fly rehearses at the windowpane,
persistent in a language without words,
and finds the glass, and finds the glass, and finds
the glass once more, and does not understand.

I think the ordinary is a kind
of patience: how the dust accepts the light,
how shadows lean across the floor and stay
a while, then go, and leave the boards as bright
as if they had forgotten they were gray.

What we call permanence is mostly habit:
the clock that keeps its small mechanical faith,
the chair that holds the shape of who once sat in
it, the slow arithmetic of breath.

And time, which is no river but a room
we furnish with our comings and our goings,
will keep the cup, the ticking, and the fly,
and hold them lightly, knowing they are loanings.

Outside, the iron gate complains against
its hinge, the way a grief will find its voice
each morning, rust rehearsing what it lost.
The ivy takes the railing inch by inch,
a green insistence nothing asked it for,
and somewhere down the street a bicycle
squeaks past the bakery, and the day begins
its small accounting, counting what remains.

The eelgrass leans one way, then the other,
as if deciding whether to stay.
My boots sink an inch into the grey mud,
and the harbor keeps its small secrets:
a hinge of crab shell, a bottle cap gone green,
the ribbed back of a mussel bed
still holding yesterday's rain.

You would have liked it here, I think,
though I always say that at low tide,
when the water pulls back like a sheet
and shows what it was covering.
The herons work the shallows without apology.
The wind smells of iron and kelp.

Somewhere out past the breakwater
the ferries keep their schedules,
ordinary and certain as clocks.
I pocket a stone the color of dishwater
and walk back toward the lot,
where the pines shake off their wet
and the sky gets on with the business
of going grey, then greyer,
then quietly, finally, dark.

A gnat circles the oil flame
and finds its small heaven.

Cold morning. The stone step
holds yesterday's rain.
I kneel to it like a door
that has no key.

Somewhere a dog barks twice,
then nothing. The silence
takes the shape of the bowl
I forgot to fill.

What I called prayer
was only breathing
slower than usual,
watching the steam
leave the kettle
and not come back.

The tide came in at Ballykeel
with a smell of rust and weed,
and the gulls cried out like hungry bairns
and the boats came home with speed.
But one boat did not come that night,
and the harbor bell rang low,
for the sea keeps what the sea takes
and it does not tell us so.

Sing hey for the salt, sing ho for the star,
sing for the lads on the water so far.
The wind she blows and the hearth burns bright,
but the sea keeps her own on a winter's night.

Young Colm had a girl on shore,
a ribbon in her hair,
and he swore he'd bring her silver spoons
from the markets over there.
He swore he'd bring her silken thread
and a comb of ivory,
but the sea keeps what the sea takes
and it keeps it from you and me.

Sing hey for the salt, sing ho for the star,
sing for the lads on the water so far.
The wind she blows and the hearth burns bright,
but the sea keeps her own on a winter's night.

His mother keeps a candle lit
in the window by the door,
and she sets his plate upon the cloth
as she did the night before.
For the sea keeps what the sea takes,
and the heart keeps what it will,
and the harbor bell rings low and slow
and the boats come home, but still.

Sing hey for the salt, sing ho for the star,
sing for the lads on the water so far.
The wind she blows and the hearth burns bright,
but the sea keeps her own on a winter's night.

The girl walks down to the harbor wall
with the ribbon gone from her hair,
and she casts no coin and she speaks no name
to the grey air standing there.
For the sea gives back what the sea will give,
a spar of wood, a shoe,
and the heart learns slow what the heart must learn:
to let the bell ring through.

On the via where the laundry breathes between walls,
she stacked the morning figs in a crate of straw,
purple and split at the seam, still warm from the tree.
Her hands were stained like old church glass.
I bought three for a coin, and she gave me five,
and told me not to bruise them on the walk home.

Her father called from the doorway, half asleep,
a name that sounded like water over stones.
She answered in the dialect of this street,
the one my mother forbade me to speak at school.
For a moment the piazza was a room,
and the room was a country, and the country was hers.

By August the crate stood empty by the wall.
The shutters closed. The laundry kept its slow
argument with the wind. I asked the baker's boy
and he shrugged, and sold me bread, and said the north,
always the north, some factory, some cousin's floor.
The figs went on splitting in other courtyards.

Now when the evening shadows climb the stone
I walk the long way past her door and think
of five figs in a paper twist, and how
she weighed them in her palm before she let them go,
as if to teach me the honest price of things,
as if she knew I would still be counting.

Each night she fills the wick with oil,
though the flame has long since learned
to burn without her watching.

The chair across the table keeps its dust.
She sets a second cup there anyway,
lets the steam rise into the empty air
and vanish like a name said once, softly.

What prayer is this, to leave a door unlatched
against the cold, to keep the kettle warm
for no one coming? The moth at the glass
does not ask. It only presses toward
the small gold room of light,
again, again, until the dark
gives back its answer.