CRITICA

Offering a dream week to week, my Montessori-school-in-the-woods, three-year-old self but wiser, on father’s lap

reading flash cards, counting by subtraction. Analyst leans over, then into, some other iteration still distant

a warm hand on the perimeter. Years later, after the death of both parents, she akin to me,

rents a house in the old neighborhood. Standing outside to smoke, or take out garbage imagines

a cabin in Montana, my dead grandmother’s house in Iowa, the comforting confines of the elevator in Washington Heights

anywhere but home is home. Holding head in hands, sobbing, groaning skeletal wreaking and wails through every layer of depth.

Each scripted line, improvised scene, belies bats-in-the-belfry animates animus, resounds with ringing in ears, eras, years and temporality closer to primitive

— we are intimate strangers.

Why forget my bracelet, locket, time before identity, all placed next to the chair, on the table where face-to-face, one cannot hide.

This happens on my watch, words portend: transformation. Why this instead of that?

Usurped by images of an earlier San Francisco, Playland by the Sea, the Haight, 1969

where very young, my youthful self-wishing-to-be-older, free and easy an imagined adult with flowers in her hair

now preternaturally-on-the-couch, incomplete

the way good-byes are never said.