Gowanus, Late Summer
(2000)

2

The trees flinch in late summer air over Boerum Hill. We already
miss scorching on that Salt Marsh Road.

3

The summer was about rage. Will recollection fall dead off the trees?
Can it? I am the one who left.

4

Did my daughters hike to the Sunken Forest with their father this
summer? Is to immagine, to imagine regret?

5

When father took me fishing in a rowboat in the Catskills, a wall of
rain came over us. Were there cicadas?

14

No dejection on returning from this vacation—this man so deeply
attentive we might be lingering still, under the cicadas uproar.

9

If only I could know a plover—or warbler. But a suburban girl
learns little more than red and brown—or brown and brown.

8

Home from vacation, no fuzzy seeds soften the air. The former hus—
band's studied neglect has suddenly quit—is that it?

10

All the harsh remarks about him that he himself reported to me, I
now believe and repeat to those who made them. Torrential.

12

At any moment I can recall that downpour walking home from a
visit with my daughters—mostly the heart, the louder beating.

18

When the leaves shudder, despondent is the season. Soon I'll rise in
the window's dark light.

19

Isn't it true that the leaves on certain trees turn suddenly, before the
others? As suddenly, all the red is brittle. What if the lover
moves closer?

26

Thankful the former husband does not return in my sleep—to my
dream pillow comes the lover's plum preserves.

28

Will the Gowanus Canal look less leafy in the fall or more so—I do
not know since I've lived here so few seasons. Away from men.
With daughters.

29

The daughters' complaints escalate over anything. A breeze for
example. Happily the leaves scatter.

From THE NARROW ROAD TO THE INTERIOR (W.W. Norton, 2006)