Prologue: The Reef in Winter
It was fearsome to consider that the violence undergirding what passes as the American care structure endures because of the thing it can be undone by, which is love.
– Jia Tolentino
It appeared to me, a square apparition
in a desperate midnight scroll, my brain shattered
by hours of screaming—sleep
training, or whatever it is we were
doing, when I wore noise
canceling headphones and watched my son
thrash in silence on the monitor like a seal
trapped in a bathtub. I wanted the reef
more than anything. How its rocks
shone like polished bone in the sun,
clear water sure deliverance. We would be
safe there, and silent, my son would reach
his arms to the rising moon, the whispering palms
each night in knowing benediction, then sleep.
Outside, another blizzard piled up the windows,
casing us in. Only later I learned what hulked
just outside the frame—cranes, and their army,
that the reef was a fortress, an empire’s
secret. Mischief, they’d named it.
A few years later, when they wanted
to stake their claim for good, really
settle it, they shipped in mothers.
Midnight, with Volcano
After twelve years of marriage, we only fight
when the kids are asleep. We unload
the dishwasher with complete devotion,
as if in slow motion—the sounds of our dishes
against each other, of silver knives chiming in the drawer,
all midnight bells that could summon
the children awake, drowsy in their footies,
bring them padding down stairs to rub their eyes at us.
What’s at this center, in the dark of our new winter?
Fire, or rock, or a long, impossible fall?
Once I feared a middle-age vanilla, the loss
of wonder at your mouth on my mouth.
We’d raid the supermarket for want
of vowels. Now, the drones bumble above us
and we are too microscopic to appear
in any of the photographs.
We are supposed to learn resilience
but volcanoes everywhere teach self-
absorption, and I worry how to bottle
our darkest emotions. As far is it can,
the pioneer moss trundles onward,
a deep-breath green at the edge
of the obsidian. The children persist
at sounding us out. They’ll learn
we never listened for warnings. Didn’t realize
what we slept on was alive all this time. They say
it takes a village, but what of the village on the edge
of an eruption? Still, we never go to bed
angry. We wish each other goodnight,
our mantras humming like lost bees
into another generation’s worried dreams.
In Which I Learn About Taoism While Waiting for the Storm to Pass
Each singular kingdom a throwback captured until Later
Heaven hyperlinks Feng Shui for Beginners to redesign your living
room. Lo, how the mountain communicates with the lake,
Becky’s wallpaper with her rugs. A yin and a yang,
marker on rubber—in Catholic school, we doodled all over our Converse
soles through another immaculate conception. Virgins
and saints in an unspooled wait, wait, wait, worried late
90s teen pregnancy. The difference between receive and create hits
later, when I’d want it, but I wasn’t. The ultrasound tech}
in her smallest words. On the ceiling, she’d taped a year of blue-green abandoned
seas, portals over the heads of all the women on the table
with their minds on later. On heaven.
When my son is asked to listen to the sounds of spring
he says I can only hear trees. Which is really the wind, later.
We’ve been told to hold on
to later, after great suffering bends us
like trees in a storm.
If we’re lucky, we’ll live
through it, our long lives a mountain
of bent trees, all of our names saved
for storms,
later.