2 p.m. Sandell Morse

for Victoria

Your favorite place is Scituate Pond, a place you go daily or nearly daily summers. I have never been to your favorite place, but you have shown me pictures of you wading, of your grandson, who is maybe six or seven, now, paddling a child’s kayak. I know you swim laps over and back, over and back. I imagine you floating your body buoyant, your eyes closed. Perhaps, you see colors or stars. Perhaps, you see nothing. Perhaps, you remember your Great Uncle Doc, the brilliant storyteller in your family.

Because I know you, because you are my friend, I know you love stories. You love books. You love a painting your husband bought you. It is a painting by a friend, and you hung it in your kitchen where you see it and love it every day.

Because I know you, I know you love your family, your husband, your children, your grandchildren, your blended family. Here is what I did not know about you: years ago you hitchhiked to work in Boston, two rides each way. “That was crazy,” you say. You also hitchhiked through Europe and Cape Cod where you met your first husband. He drove you back to the city. I assume that city was Boston.

People who are racist, sexist, homophobic, people who believe lies or who won’t listen to facts make you angry. I surmise those kinds of folks have always made you angry. I hear you. You find peace sitting in sun that shines in your window, a good book in your lap. You also find peace on Scituate Pond where you swim and swim. If you could paint a picture of anything, you would paint Scituate Pond.

for Rachel Cherry

You and me and the blank page take a walk and you and me and the blank page stand under the tree we like: the big grandfather of an oak tree. All the leaves on the tree sway.

The blank page says, Well. You say, We’ve been having trouble with you. I say, Could we agree you offer us a first line at least? The blank page shrugs, blankly. You say, Just give a word?

It is a too hot day, the air is thick with heat. We lean towards the blank page. Its soft, bare arms folded over its chest.

You say, Look, we heard you have a special service. We have money, you know.

At that, the blank page nods and digs a hand in its pocket. It pulls out a piece of - what - air? There’s nothing to see.

The blank page says, The trouble with you is you think you are the writing, the words and the letters and the marks and the ideas. You think that’s who you are but you’re not.

You raise your chin and say, Who are we, then? I say, Yeah, who are we? The blank page shows us what it holds in its hand and nods again.

for Mathew Hanratty

‘Reading the air’ or ‘Kuuki wo yomu’ is a Japanese concept that means being attentive to the atmosphere of social situations or conversations.

I met a woman who read the air around me and told me it said beware of lilac. Lilac would bring great disappointment. My mind went straight to the lilac envelope I’d address to my dad, and the letter inside that complained he was not living up to the childhood name I’d given him: Mum.

Later, I stood at the postbox with the sealed envelope and wondered whether the disappointment would be for him, or for me? Which mattered most? I ripped the envelope corners leaving the stamp and address intact. He would understand the gist even if words were missing. His imagination might fill the holes and I could deny assumptions easily. I posted the letter.

It wasn’t just that the woman could read the air, but she could taste it too. When an atmosphere was particularly knotty, she said it was like scraps of paper in her mouth, laced with cloves and pepper, stiff on her tongue, scratching and cutting.

When she read the air between new friends, people meeting and delighting in each other for the first time, she said it was like ever so juicy raspberries, topped with double cream. The sensation of pouring cream - that’s what she saw in the air.

for Ellen at Lake George

When is a lake a lament? When is a lake a lost map to the girl you were, to the way you’d wake to fog on the shore-lap and walk out into green rolling blue and blue shining hectic to the hemlocks?

Is the sky an hour shouldered in gulls?

When is it a map back to the time before you and I became women in air, women in pavement and ink, women trailing children’s feet down pain-bright asphalt walks?

When is a lake a dress you sink your body into, and when is the air a hammock to bear your skin?

Tell me its claim and swing. Tell me the long afternoon, suspended, the bend and moan through needle-light when wind rocks the lake to us and back, our reflections to stone. Tell me the lake’s name and fog over the dim pages, exhalation and your hand on mine, when book, when rope, when shoulder. Say what we lose when the earth tilts like water. Tell me what we miss.

for Nancy

Meet me in Marilla’s body. Meet me in her afternoon, late island light bending through her kitchen glass as she sets out the plate of russets.

Supper is planned, tea is ready. Soon Anne will be home from school.

Once we would have met in Anne’s Haunted Wood. Once you and I were girls. But now Marilla sits down and we sink into her slat-back chair, begin to mend the pinafores.

Meet me in her knees, whining dim and creased by pinewood hours scrubbing the floorboards with ash and lye. Soon Anne will swing her satchel into the room,

but now she’s whirling to the Snow Queen and we’re here. A shame the girl believes in ghosts.

Last night these hands taught the girl to pray. Over this gingham lap, they close together: we remember.

Meet me here, in her hips—here, looking out the window and down the damp lane, for ourselves, for the girl, and try to remember the way, just this morning, end over crimson end, we braided her hair.

for Katie

Be extra kind you tell your son the year the mouth on the screen opens, oceanic, mean, and becomes our king. Be kind you say mornings on Mission Beach, and try to step around the kelp, whose tender brown and green shoots curl up, torn from their forest on the ocean floor. Do they remember the cold, the slow unfurling in water they wore like pearls of wind? Or the way their frayed folds stuttered in the gray amniotic wake? Rootless, featherless, once they clung to the twilight ground in holdfasts. A gray whale hid her calf in their branches. See her: hunched and silent, waiting for the great white mouths to pass. Rootless, featherless, we try to be kind: make ourselves night-leaf and sanctuary, try to wind our witch-skin around faces small and our own. And they are all our own.