Water, Water, Everywhere

In 1893 they were already hurting. Boss Tweed had died of pneumonia down in a jail cell on Ludlow Street fifteen years earlier, and even though the Tammany Machine still had plenty of juice to it you could feel them losing their grip: Charles Parkhurst was making noise from the pulpit and the Lexow Committee was gearing up, and they weren’t fucking around. Not to mention a new Grand Jury investigation and all the so-called “reform candidates” making a fuss.

Her home lacks clocks.

But the woman knows what time it is, at least to the half-hour; she tracks its passage via programs on the living-room TV, her family’s focus, its jabbering blue hearth.  And when Geraldo appears and her baby hasn’t, she knows that something is amiss, that He been beat up after school.  Or maybe one a them Dominicans in they big cars, like a old Lincoln or something?  With the windows open and they music turn all the way up, down from Washington Heights?  Maybe they runned over my baby in the street like he nothing, the woman thinks, like he a animal.

I was six years old when I first saw the hole in the lake, out near the dam—that was the year we left the campsite at Putah Creek to be closer to Spanish Flat; that was the year I saw my mother for the last time. Auntie and Uncle parked the camper, disallowing us kids to sit inside it during daylight, and backed the orange speedboat into Lake Berryessa before driving out to the dam in the brown pickup. The hole went unexplained. It interrupted the placid surface, water entering its maw, as though the earth had given way with geometric precision—a bending of physics; a miracle shoved where no one would see.

You dive off the boat tank first.
The flippered feet lie flat then flip
a half circle, like a rush hour fuel gauge
falling from Full to Empty.

There is a Formica dinette in the East River
Manhattan
Sitting upright
As if waiting to be
Set. 

This 4th of July, backs to slanted sun, we watch waves.
A lipsticked youth paces, hair inert,
as kids scream or cry in shallows of floating waste.

There is a definite trend toward making Mother a member of the family again.

With the use of lovely Formica colors and beautiful wood grains there is every reason to plan an open kitchen that is part of the dining room-living room. 

Anyone can haunt. Everyone does. You haunt your own mother when you leave her body. You haunt that first home for all time.

No one thought much of it when the garbage men went on strike. They had a list of twenty demands pinned to every signpost and streetlamp. Later I would learn that it was a city-wide effort, but at the time, I thought it was only local. One demand was bolded and italicized: We prefer to be called waste collectors.