Lullaby

Oh Mama, the monkeys never did come down the street,
I tried, but they never did come. There was nothing
in the back woods but woods.

The trees never moved an inch when we weren't looking.
All that thumping we heard must have been rabbits rabbits.
No angels in the bushes.

No Indians underfoot. Just the boys hanging from their
home-made houses, waiting for us to come close enough
to catch.

That old beech I used to curl into never did know it.
When I carved my name there, it never winced.
It would have dropped me

like an apple for somebody else to bite, if it had apples.
You were right. You can tell me all you want to now.
That white sky

is just a lot of clouds moving together fast, not
an edge of paper that somebody might fold, and if
I'm having trouble with my breathing,

it's that I'm still trying to make room for myself
in an envelope that's not even there. I never did
learn the birds' names, did I

but they weren't singing to me, and the lilac blooming
in the far corner of the back yard, never bloomed,
I know it now, for anyone.

- Marie Howe

The Promise

In the dream I had when he came back not sick
but whole, and wearing his winter coat,

he looked at me as though he couldn't speak,
as if there were a law against it, a membrane he wouldn't break.

Hi silence was what he could not
not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,

as we do, in time.
And I told him: I'm reading all this Buddhist stuff,

and listen, we don't die when we die. Death is an event,
a threshold we pass through. We go on and on

and into light forever.
And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look we'd pass

across the kitchen table when dad was drunk again and dangerous,
the level look that wants to tell you something,
something important, in a crowded room, and can't.

-Marie Howe