Illusion

I took it for a tuft of fur
but it turned out to be a seed.
What looked like a white bird
floating on the breeze
was actually a plastic bag.
There have been clouds
that looked like rain

but in fact they were the smoke
of distant forests burning.
I thought I knew the shape
of paw but I had to rethink
the delicacy of feet—these,
without their claws—when I raked
the withered husk of a coyote

from underneath the porch, believing
it was just a piece of wood.
I laid it
in the shallow grave I dug
and found it had not four slim legs,
but three—now I’ve been disabused
of my quaint picture of what happens
in winter when I’m gone:

drifting snow, biting wind, animals
hunkered down
in leaf-lined dens—for in reality
the wild beasts seek refuge
in the dark beneath my porch
while humans put on fleece and feathers,
boots and woolen caps
and roam the dim, white woods
setting traps.

Stories

My grandmother survived
where others didn’t—witness
the stone at the cemetery
that just says “Babies.”
She told us stories
in the kitchen, over dominoes
spread on blue formica,
her stiff and knotted fingers
touching wood, her quiet,
measured voice reciting

tales of woodstoves
cold rooms, ice
on the water pitcher
lost mittens, lean times
bread and mustard
and how when she was just a baby
the doctor came but it was too late
to save her father
from his appendix. Years later,

I sat in a living-room
the sofas packed with relatives
the air still, blinds half closed
against the summer heat
when the story fell from a cousin’s lips.
“The doctor cut him open
on the dining-room table,”
Gertrude said
in her high, quavering voice
and suddenly I saw

a room I’d never been inside
and when she added with sad reverence
a coda I had heard before,
how great-Grandma had to sell
her husband’s pride, the horses
I imagined that day
though I knew nothing
of riding in the buggy
or walking behind the plow.