“I Hardly Remember Those People”
“I hardly remember those people,” you said,
our fathers’ aunts and uncles, with their
old-fashioned immigrant names and
their modest midcentury houses.
They’ve been dead for ages, of course.
There were sleds and a hill in the snow,
and a big dog, I think I remember,
at a few awkward holiday dinners
where we dressed up as family members
and mimed happy-family gestures.
My father’s brother’s son,
our faces now both blurred by age,
I hardly remember you either.
And my children don’t know you at all.
“If There Were Something Simple I Could Say”
If there were something simple I could say
to lift from empty air and knit
a canopy of reassuring stars
beneath which sleep could find you,
If with my weightless words there could
be carved a you-shaped space, and you
could burrow down into a dreamless night
and mute the circus music, for a time,
then you would sleep:
and I, though sleeping too, would somehow know
you’ve fled this seething world for a few hours.
* * *