30 March

FORECAST
1996, 1997, 2011

Wind blows cold
through a crack
beneath the door.
It’s only a matter
of time.

29 March

THE BORROWED DAYS
1999, 2009, 2011

Greedy March, says legend,
begged generous April
for a loan of three fine days,
changed their weather dreadful,
and never returned them
to their rightful owner.
This is a perilous stretch
between the seasons,
when ice glistens with schemes
of melting, and wool coats
undo their buttons.
Dangerous days these are,
ripped from jealous Winter’s clutch,
resting in the cupped hands
of tender Spring, for now.
Beware.

28 March

I DON’T WANT TO BE ALL RIGHT JUST YET
1986, 2000, 2011
for Margaret


I don’t care if I am
behaving like a three-year old spoiled brat,
now and then I need some time when I don’t have to be all right.
Go on: cajole, entreat, beg, threaten. It won’t work.
I’m where I want to be. Exactly. Not all right just yet.
Feel free to say you’re sorry - you owe a few apologies -
but don’t expect immediate results. You could just go away,
I wouldn’t mind. I don’t require a witness to my little snit.
In fact, I’d just as soon you occupy
a different room, a separate floor, a building
in another city. And it’s not about you, either.
It’s not your business, not your fault,
not yours to fix, not rocket science.
I’m not all right, and I don’t wish to be.
I choose to fuss, weep, mutter, stomp my foot,
kick this dumb cardboard box down the basement stairs.
If it goes well, I may not be all right for quite a while.
You’d best be making plans for your own upkeep until
further notice. And file for future reference:
this is what tending to my upkeep
looks like.

27 March

BUTTON, BUTTON, BUTTON

1994 I admired the insight that people push his button largely because there’s a big red circle in the middle of his chest marked “Button.”

2010 Years ago I made a game without rules for a friend: blue and rust-colored flannel squares sewn together checkerboard-fashion, and several sets of buttons, whose shapes and colors I sadly can’t recall. I do remember we liked moving the buttons around on the squares, piling them up, arranging them into patterns. I need more buttons in my life.

2011 There are odd words I learn early in whatever new language I’m acquiring, and “button” is one of them. When one of my students in Poland introduced herself, she said that her last name meant “button.” I told her I would never forget, and three years later there it was in my brain’s storage unit, gleaming like a shiny little button: Guzyk.

26 March

DATA

1992 I don’t know for sure what I’m avoiding, but I’m getting ready to know.

1993 It sounds as if I’m trying to decide something I’ve already decided.

1994 He wrapped his arms around me as he dozed and I rubbed my knuckles back and forth across his forearm, whispering, “I am running my cup across the bars of my jail. I am trying to erase you.”

1995 We had agreed to stay together for as long as we were good for each other, but we never took data or interpreted any data we stumbled over.

1996 “If you put it out there, it comes back to you,” he said the last time we spoke. He must have been thinking of the best things he put out there. I was listening to sirens wailing in the distance.

1997 One last letter, and then we’ll be strangers.

24 March

DRUNK TRIPTYCH

2000, USA
Two men with the same name, from the same city in Eastern Europe where they were professionals in the same field, living now in the same city in the United States, have a problem. The first calls the second only when he’s drunk and the second doesn’t like it.

2002, Russia
On the second day of Marina’s wedding, after two hours of trying to persuade me, her relatives finally persisted just a second longer than I did. I took a tiny sip of vodka na posashok, which translates something like “for the walking stick,” an early, less lethal equivalent of “for the road.” Do dna, the guys chorused, “bottoms up.” I summoned the most devastating twinkle in my eye and replied in English, “Don’t push your luck.”

2009, Poland
I ended up sitting across the aisle from a drunk on the train. Benevolent enough, but the slurred speech and forced merriment were unsettling, as was my empathy for the boy traveling with him. You can get used to just about anything, I suppose, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. I may have imagined the sweet, stale, nauseating smell, but it was getting stronger as the train approached my station, and I was ever so glad to disembark.

22 March

TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT
No Junk, Please

I chanced a shocking but polite reply
to a compliment on the sinuous berry-red blouse
that may have been the brief, uneasy past
of a woman just my size:
"Thank you," I answered. "I got it at the dump."

I could construct a life around items gleaned
from the Leverett Transfer Station.

I could read last year's best-sellers.
My conversations' center of gravity could become
what everybody else was just beginning to forget.

I could store my second-hand laundry
in a spotlessly clean white wicker hamper.

I could write the story of my alternate life in a journal with kittens on the cover,
the first few pages ripped out, the rest left tantalizingly blank.

I could divine my alter ego’s future with a Mystifying Oracle Ouija Board.
I could assess my prospects in modern-day alchemy
with an Erlenmeyer flask and a collection of experiments for children
published the year before I was born.

There is plenty of wear left in my neighbors' cast-offs,
a multitude of gently used identities to take or leave.