THE LADDER

…and behold the angels of God ascending and descending upon it.
—Genesis 28:12

1. Denial

                When our little angel came home one night with wings, we thought nothing of it. She had always been crafty and cloud-light, her blue uniform hanging like frosting on fluff as she drifted up the stairs, down the hall, and shut her door with the soft click of a young girl home past curfew and holding her breath. The single feather that settled there on the rug was a testament to her artfulness, her ingenuity—imagine her patient eye squinting through the jeweler’s glass as she set each of a thousand delicate fibers into that waxy stem, the dried blood at the tip no doubt her own blood and sweat poured into this school project, feather by feather as she built two full wings from nothing, two wings flecked with magic dust like powdered sugar that clung to our pores and turned our hands into hummingbirds of flight! It was amazing, yes, but nothing unusual for our little angel, our namer of names, our speaker of tongues and truths. We taped the feather to the door of our refrigerator, proud as any parents, and went back to bed without beating her.

2. Anger

                The next morning the refrigerator had built a nest in the rafters of the kitchen from shredded cardboard and a large box of flexible straws our daughter had left on the counter. The room was speckled with droppings, mostly purple from eggplant rotting in the crisper, but also bright green from the baby spinach. The refrigerator, angled awkwardly against the slant of the roof, cooed to a half-carton of eggs. We brought in our stepladder and a broom, but as we approached the appliance became agitated, first rattling its door, and then dive-bombing us several times before the tape gave way and it plunged lifeless through the floor and into the basement. The feather hung bobbing on a breeze—but there was no breeze. We looked at each other, at the hole in the floor, the heap of metal, and the feather dancing before us more amazing than any school project. We took the broom upstairs to wake our daughter.

3. Bargaining

                The door to her room was locked. We broke the lock, but she had already moved a dresser in the way, moved her nightstand, her bed, and then she sat in the bed in a lump of feathers and flesh. All her things were heavy for a girl so light. It’s okay, we called into the crack, we’re not upset. So you came home with wings. They’ll come right off. We can sew them onto the back of a vest, a beautiful leather vest you can wear whenever you want. You can grow gills or stripes, we said. Anything but wings. Just tell us what you want. We put our ears to the door and waited, but our little angel only spoke in tongues.

4. Depression

                Imagine a girl growing up with wings. Imagine such a thing! We slumped against the door, imagining.

5. Acceptance

                After some time that feather floated up the stairs, down the hall, and settled into the warm pool of our weeping. Again there was no breeze, no volition but the great unseen nudging of all things, now undeniable. We held the feather tenderly between us like an offering. Despite the long night in the kitchen, it remained pristine and powder-full, it’s simple touch exciting even the tips of our fingers. It seemed to glow and throb in silent thrumming, undulating as it was in the air. Carefully we slipped the feather through the door’s slim opening and fixed it to the side of the dresser, which leapt to life so quickly that we fell face-first into the room. The dresser darted about blindly, several feet off the floor, crashing into the other furniture, all of it springing momentarily to flight in a maelstrom of polished oak and plastic. We found the broom handle swirling beside us. Our daughter cowered on the bed. Then we remembered her wings, and went down to get the stepladder.

BLUE-GREY PLACE

every morning the same morning      the same squawk of
the ironing board unfolding      the clink of spoon against
bowl      his oatmeal like tar      sugarless      the same
voices spilling over it      midwestern dialects most bland
therefore most pleasing to that secret place where
proximity stands for comfort      repetition the golden

status quo of Good Morning America      a car bomb
rocked North Ireland overnight but first how to fold your
linen napkins into swans of origami      and lying in bed
as the water ran      the swish of steam      his hand pressing
hard into Dockers      he’d complain to no one about the
pleats      about a woman’s work      the silence of the

house      what he wouldn’t give for a blowjob and a bagel
right now      or just a day off his feet      and down the
hall      in my dark room      under comic book sheets     
call it the shadow of his second-hand solitude      call it
prescience or longing      call it letting go      or grabbing
on to patriarchy      his villainy stripped away with my

presence      but for the first time      and every time      I
wanted to be him in forty years      I wanted his grey hair
and grunting acceptance      I wanted every day to begin
and end just like it did:      bright morning on the yellow
walls      warm steam from an iron      the day’s news a
garbled redundancy on a small screen of black and white

CRAZY UNCLE JOE

he piles his bricks he piles his bricks alone
while overhead the basement skylight flicks
an incessant phosphorescent monochrome
he piles one brick then two then one-oh-six
scrape-slips the last so tight it barely fits
and thinks no mortar there in ancient rome
no glue hell lights were made by rubbing sticks
and they made do with it they felt at home
with just their fists no mathemagic tricks
for them no sorrow in a dial tone
no wives so sad they’d slit their tiny wrists
to sleep forever still and stacked like stone
so he piles his bricks he piles them all alone
his mind a startled bug its shell outgrown

THE YOUNGS

1
We fish salmon or carp or rainbow trout or any
kind of fish we care to call them. Alewife, bowfin,
walleye, muskellunge with teeth enough to take
a finger down. Doesn’t matter what name these

heavy bodies haul up through the dark slop of
the sewage creek to die and spawn or die in
drowning, a paste of black muck on their meaty
gills. Dirty water only ankle deep—they leap

from pool to pool exhausted over rocks and roots
and the five bowling balls we stole from Dewey
Garden’s dumpster down the street. That game
we called the Crash and Splash—to crack those

plastic spheres like eggs, or crack the rounded rocks
we drove their 14 pounds against, whichever
hard thing gave up first. But it was us split bored
for suppertime, and there they lie, lead coconuts,

two eyes, a nose, no mouth. And the black bass—
another fish they probably aren’t—wind their urgent
way around our monument to mess, oblivious.
My only tackle is a hook and line still tangled

at the top. Bait’s a stale slice of bread I told my
daddy would be fed to ducks. I drop the 12-pound
line from the footbridge, knot wound around my
middle finger tight. Nothing bites. I add more bread

and cast again. Mike runs off to make a spear,
but dumbass Dave dives in—not like a swimmer,
though, like a baserunner into home, horizontal
hydroplane and arms outstretched, every scrawny

inch of him engaged in reaching for the fish,
which scatter all at once to gone. But one of those
white wakes barrels into the open end of an upturned
shopping cart. Thrashes in its cage, headlong into

the lichen-covered bars. By the time I climb down
to meet him, Dave’s already dragged the frantic mass
by the tail to the nearest bank. We gather there
to watch it die. It dies. What next?

2
                                                                      Here comes
Sarah Young, middle-aged mother of three, a teller
at a bank all day handling money that isn’t hers,
fingers cracked and calloused from the counting

of crisp new bills and crumpled notes, all of it dusted
with blood and coke, I heard, and dirt from the street,
grease from an engine well, and sweat, and saliva
somehow, some of them hungry enough they’re

licking it, and she’s always got a cold, always sniffing
fumes from hand-sanitizer that stings her papercuts.
She’s climbing up the asphalt drive in a stationwagon.
Heat of the day another weight upon her. The dread

of dinner-work—but at least her boys are home from
summer camp. Great boys—a little slow, perhaps, but wise,
their only crime is too much kindness. And think on that
as six paces from the box she hits the stench of what’s

been baking there since noon. Rotten flesh, dissected
with a stick, both eyes gone, their blackened pits
still glaring. A feast of flies grazes on the wet slop
that’s leaking through a shredded grocery bag,

and soaking her electric bill. But here is where she
doesn’t flinch or vomit in a bush. No bile dripping
down her chin, no pallor, sudden horror at our gift.
Here is where she doesn’t turn to mark each little

monster’s house, or look for signs she’s being watched.
Instead she sighs and waits a beat, then goes inside
to fetch her rubber gloves.

3
                                                        Or six months later,

her husband John, an engineer at the camera plant,
his last vacation before the layoffs, downsizing like
a new disease, and it’s been snowing off and on for days,
but he’s got a dozen rolls of Bermuda in his bag,

and a blazing tan to prove it, his family half-asleep
from the six-hour flight, and the drive home’s been
his for humming. Endless banks of white from the plows
like mountains in the moonlight—scalably small

and only seeming inhospitable. One last glass of port
and then to bed, he thinks, seeing the glow of his own
porch light. Driveway’s dark, the snowpack two feet deep,
but the wagon’s already been through hell and back.

He guns it. See the bumper’s rusty prow puff up
proud before slamming into the icy wall we laid,
layer by layer with a garden hose last week. The sound
is loud enough to wake the neighbors down the street.

But John’s a stubborn man, and puts it in the reverse.
Four more tries until the engine dies. Each Young
so still they can hear the faintest ticking of a fluid
dripping from the car. They stare ahead with faces

that are merely flesh. Until the father opens his door,
and one by one the Youngs ascend in silence—father,
then mother, then son, then son, then son—the Buick
splayed across the icy bank like the carcass of a buck.

EVEN SO

Our cat cries at night for no reason.
A yawl through her one contiguous

room until I find her there she is in
the bathtub looking lost there she is

in the hall. It’s amazing light from
a bulb will find you everywhere

you look its looking back in every
shade and— Imagine color without

a shape. Imagine a wall at the lip
of the visible universe in all directions

equidistant now touch it bowl on top
of bowl a bell and you its clapper.

When I drop our cat she goes right
back to yawling lost along whatever

wall I found her. Sometimes the rock’s
so big you build the house around it.

And because the house is there
the street is there, and all the houses

on the street are there all the people
all the gaps between the people and

the gaps between the gaps are gaping
open oceans learned to hug the land.