ABSTRACT 
 
 
 
 
Title of Thesis: TENDING  
  
 Caitlin Reid, Master of Fine Arts, 2018 
  
Thesis directed by: Professor Stanley Plumly, Department of 
English 
 
 
Tending is a poetry collection concerned with the mutability of landscapes, stories, 
and relationships. In a mix of free-verse sonnets, found language, and discovered 
forms, these narrative poems listen for the old songs and everyday birds that drift 
through urban and pastoral settings to flood the speaker with memory. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
TENDING   
 
 
 
by 
 
 
Caitlin Reid 
 
 
 
 
 
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of 
Master of Fine Arts 
2018 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 
Professor Stanley Plumly, Chair 
Professor Joshua Weiner 
Professor Gerard Passannante 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© Copyright by 
Caitlin Reid 
2018 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
Acknowledgements 
 
I’ve borrowed five titles that I’m aware of: “Almagest” from Ptolemy, “Casida of the 
Branches” from Federico Garcia Lorca, “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” from John 
Ashbery, “After Apple-Picking” from Robert Frost, and “Who do you wish was with 
us?” from Dylan Thomas.  
 
“Cathedral of Learning, after Orientation” borrows a line from Octavio Paz’s poem 
“Piedra de Sol” (“Sunstone”), translated by Eliot Weinberger. “Version Control” is a 
found poem from a Git white page on the subject. “Second Marriage” adapts 
language from a National Park Service Preservation Brief called Repointing Mortar 
Joints in Historic Masonry Buildings. 
ii 
 
 
 
Table of Contents 
 
 
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………...ii	
Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………..iii	
Skyfishing…………………………………………………………………………..…1 
Self-Taught ................................................................................................................... 2	
Almagest ....................................................................................................................... 3	
Epithalamion ................................................................................................................. 4	
Waiting Where We Can Go Home ............................................................................... 5	
Like Rose Oil in Wooden Vials .................................................................................... 6	
The Hell It Is…………………………………………………………………………..7 
Sugarsnaps…………………………………………………………………………….9 
Indelible.......................................................................................................................10 
A Visiting Congregation..............................................................................................11 
Casida of the Branches.................................................................................................12 
Admittance...................................................................................................................13 
Killdeer........................................................................................................................14 
Anthem for My Brother...............................................................................................15 
Into the Dusk-Charged Air...........................................................................................16 
The Cathedral of Learning, after Orientation..............................................................18 
Version Control............................................................................................................19 
Proofreading.................................................................................................................20 
From a Glacier Since Retreated...................................................................................21 
Oliver Poem.................................................................................................................22 
After Apple-Picking.....................................................................................................24 
Street Sweeping...........................................................................................................25 
Counting Poem............................................................................................................26 
Bananas for Stu............................................................................................................27 
Second Marriage..........................................................................................................28 
Who do you wish was with us?...................................................................................29 
Tumbling Run..............................................................................................................30 
Kevlar and Calfskin.....................................................................................................31 
Crayfish.......................................................................................................................32 
Against Elegy..............................................................................................................33 
Pruning........................................................................................................................34 
Hillwater.....................................................................................................................35 
Tending.......................................................................................................................40 
 
 
iii 
 
 
 
Skyfishing 
 
We play a game to bring the bats. 
They have to be invited 
at dusk when we expect no more  
cars to cross our country road. 
We crouch to drag our fingers 
through the blue-stone gravel, 
count down for the jump, 
and scatter fists of stony bait 
that tempt them to us. As we watch 
for the rocks to pause between 
their rise and fall, for stillness, something  
tucks my chin to chest exactly as 
the hard rain rattles down. 
We lift our heads to light  
sucked up by silhouettes of pear  
trees piercing the horizon. 
Then bats arrive as slips of black 
flung about in dips and surges, 
as if by the will of another 
being on the ground 
with a control box and antenna. 
The bats hear our cast stones 
as gnats and mosquitoes 
because that’s what they want. 
We lie and they listen, as you are 
listening now. Sonar requires 
a specific kind of believing  
after you hurl your own call out  
to bounce around the different darks. 
 
  
1 
 
 
 
Self-Taught 
 
there’s a radial arm saw in our family my father gave my brother headed north 
looking for land with his lover and child I remember my great-grandfather Charlie 
balancing a pool cue on the two-and-a-half fingers making his left hand how winter 
came and he didn’t have shoes for school and a teacher gave him her old pair a 
kindness too big too pretty too essential to be squandered you can’t get back the 
things you needed when you had them the man who raised my father took the safety 
off to best cut teak candlesticks that burned the first time I tried candlelight a good 
case for precious metals better hand-me-downs what happened to his missing fingers 
I know without asking in our family you pick them up yourself   
  
2 
 
 
 
Almagest 
  
City starlight struggles through the thick grape  
arbor of a restaurant I can’t afford. 
I feel tired and late for something, 
as if elsewhere’s streetlights burn fresher bulbs. 
Looking up is the oldest human longing. 
I’m grateful for the alternative firmament of fruit, 
predictable spheres to reach for from a barstool  
with more than the naked eye. 
I’d like to locate enough stars to string together  
one familiar shape. On my father’s farm, 
a black velvet sky houses polished things. 
There, I could show you your star sign. 
Now a purple dark crowds the tea lights on my table 
and what might be stars, satellites, or mid-flight planes.  
Night doesn’t fall here. Dawn doesn’t break. 
Days fade, and nights arrive already faded. 
I’m unlearning everything as arbitrary as a constellation. 
No shapes, no stories to trap and trick the light,  
to cut and tumble the world into being  
      more than it is.  
3 
 
 
 
Epithalamion 
 
There are songs that surprise 
by lasting like snow 
in the mountain’s lee, 
where a half-mile bluff shields the lowlands. 
 
Sing song kitty can’tcha ki-me-o 
 
On learning a nonsense song:  
by the chorus you’ll want another 
version to get under or behind  
the first fuddle in your ear.  
 
Sing song kitty can’tcha ki-me-o 
 
When language strikes out  
in two directions, stripped of meaning  
and double pressed, a second singer  
makes it clear. In Gaelic or sun-struck woods, 
 
He-mo hi-mo beetle bug jingle 
Me-he mi-ho pretty pennywinkle 
 
what you say twice 
is true. Ramp tom-a-doodle snake 
A-rang tangle rattlebug 
A-sing song kitty can’tcha ki-me-o 
 
When you want the words 
by heart, write them down. 
4 
 
 
 
Waiting Where We Can Go Home 
 
At the station where no train comes, 
I sit on the hard bench of expectation  
 
knowing precisely 
the position of my mother’s mind  
 
on the shelf in a house 
which no longer stands. 
 
They say it sounds like a train, 
the stillness after a storm. 
 
Trains in the trees  
when the water recedes. 
5 
 
 
 
Like Rose Oil in Wooden Vials 
 
The Bulgarians need a home 
for their goldfish. Peach 
and cherry blossoms snowball 
bloom with the apples 
on our Appalachian foothill, 
everything fragrant at once, delicate 
as the valley of the roses 
 
when they tip their glass bowl 
into our irrigation pond. 
They talk like birds 
to their fish and each other, 
then say in English, 
Give more chances  
than you get. They gift me 
 
Pushkin, ACDC, my first 
Led Zeppelin, some Zappa. 
I go back to Baltimore weekends  
for the market and report their fish  
are multiplying into new colors.  
I don’t tell them a blue heron’s  
feet mark the clay bank nightly.   
  
They’re both degreed and gone 
from Hopkins when a bigger 
pond is built below the first. 
Gravity feeds a few fish  
through the connector. 
They’re soon enormous. 
The same heron follows  
 
and now a kingfisher finds 
the rose-pink flashes 
in our cold black water. 
From the house I hear the thunk 
of fish-flesh on the headless  
drum of the overflow pipe. 
I’ve seen him swallow them whole. 
  
6 
 
 
 
The Hell It Is 
I don’t know how to pay respect 
or to whom. Honor is one fifth-grader 
being sweet to another, wanting to believe  
the real world is made of school rules  
and real life has better food. 
 
The boy with the reddest hair,  
pure red like an excuse 
to taunt and tease, he finds us  
before school as busses circle 
and spill children into the yard. 
 
Something about your book-bag 
makes him hate you. Lalala Bean,  
he sings. Then he calls me  
your little girlfriend, and I know  
you’ll show off your taekwondo  
 
while a crowd grows amused 
and mean. I like you best 
when you plead and repeat 
your schoolteacher parents, 
bright-hearted, reasoned. 
 
My sister took that stance 
against our mother once. The nurse told 
us, say It’s my body. No one can touch 
it without permission. Mom grabbed 
a silver hairbrush and replied, 
 
The hell it is. Childhood casts no light 
into the future. I could still learn 
to protect those I love instead of saving 
myself. I’ve glared at injustice 
most of my life, which is a strong way 
 
of watching and doing nothing. 
The redhead dies by fire 
when his helicopter clips a hill 
that isn’t much of a mountain. 
I’m stopped in traffic for his parade. 
 
 
7 
 
 
 
Mom strikes a bargain with Jesus 
and keeps it. My sister still says to say 
hi next I see you. I don’t 
admit you’re in jail again. 
They demolished that school 
 
this summer, carelessly, no attempt 
to dampen the deadly dust. 
Nothing breaks down as cleanly  
as it’s made. The dust gets deep 
in us all, and it stays. 
 
  
8 
 
 
 
Sugarsnaps 
  
No one can shit in the psych ward 
because the food is so bad, the same stuff 
delivered to the county jail. 
My mother’s mind improves but her guts 
distract her recovery. A cool spell 
  
grants sugarsnap vines long lives this year. 
They wrap their complicated 
shoots across the trellis near my car. 
I tear at the plants 
to fill a plastic grocery bag. 
  
It’s been a week. 
I drive a different highway 
than I did this morning for work. 
Crisp, sweet sugarsnaps will make my mother 
less crazy than the others. 
  
An attendant reaches under his desk 
to open three doors. 
I sign in and he sneers: Don’t come here 
with that. Shakes the bag. They’ll 
suffocate themselves, or you. 
  
Peapods stretch the bowl of my shirt 
in a country way of carrying. The empty bag 
gets flattened and locked in a drawer. 
I’m handed the sticky square of my name 
that I wear on my visiting body. 
  
9 
 
 
 
Indelible 
  
I think of you so rarely, I’ll have to look you up. 
But sometimes I see you in my son, in cities 
you’ve never lived in or haven’t lived in yet, 
if you’ve kept yourself alive. Please be alive. Don’t quit 
staggering across the street while I watch from my car 
with the windows up, wondering where you sleep these days. 
  
A day-drinker weaves through traffic against the light. 
I stop without honking. I’m less angry now.  
As I wait I notice a butterfly land on a soft new sidewalk 
and fold its wings in prayer. I should have pulled 
the ladder up after us. I should have put you in a room, 
door and windows shut. Don’t come home to me. 
  
Don’t knock and ask my husband to use the shower. 
Don’t show up in the rain. Here comes a man with a sign 
about the wet cement. Through its feet, the butterfly  
tastes something hardening on its tongue. 
I’m still in a red car stopped for you at a green light. 
I remember our initials in wood, then stone. 
  
10 
 
 
 
A Visiting Congregation 
 
Invasive bird, invasive branch. Heavy 
is the tree with city kids, their eyes bright 
as our yard’s starlings. The flockful kind. Youth 
groups bussed to the corner-store church line up 
this Sunday morning. You step through them all. 
Bubbles jump up your bourbon bottle’s neck 
like a level gone awry. “You judge you.” 
Wobbly in ankle-twisting boots, pregnant 
until tomorrow. In the practiced shade 
of the Tree of Heaven you lean against, 
a forty-foot weed grown too deep to kill, 
I pull at your arm to keep us moving. 
Invited bird on invited branch. Red 
light caught in the black of your undone braid. 
  
11 
 
 
 
Casida of the Branches 
 
King-bloom, king-bloom, 
half-brown by bud-break: 
the limb that knows itself in other seasons 
than lush, sudden spring.  
Who sets out rainwater bowls 
for the rented honeybees? 
When the mountain shields the sunset 
from the tiny fists of leaves, 
some branches speak, 
some listen. Funny how little  
of a first eager star we’ll ever see. 
We say we love the water 
when we mean where the light touches, 
where our bodies are held, 
a few inches (if any) more, 
where water laps the ground. 
I’m puzzled by the untouched edge of you 
a few months out of reach 
and by the honeybee’s need  
to drink. Buzzards swirl  
and turn, riding thermals. 
Black hands on a blue face, 
still-winged over the dark-milk pond, 
a sky that’s right twice a day.  
It’s the stopped clock 
we circle around. 
  
12 
 
 
 
Admittance 
 
Past the window lined with chicken wire, 
hot air warps people parking cars. Our side 
is overly air-conditioned and much smudged  
by hands. I have just tried to dress my mother 
for the first time. She will not help me 
wrap this thin cotton gown over her symptoms: 
scars from the heavy traffic of organs and infants 
across her belly, the blue ink marked on her 
legs and breasts by a stray pen. There is no time 
to wet my thumb and rub these things away  
before the nurses return to fend off the dark birds 
and burning tires alight in her eyes. 
  
13 
 
 
 
Killdeer 
 
In the spring I wake to the tractor disking 
the tomato field into good tilth. The combing 
metal pings high notes of quartz and purple shale 
like uncovered nibs on a music box. My father turns 
the tractor in half-circles, led by the wing-point  
of a grounded bird. Collared like a priest or a bowling pin,  
a killdeer shows no distinct mark of being male or female, 
something my father would disapprove of  
if it occurred to him. The bird’s parenthood 
is spelled out by the broken-wing display. The gesture  
looks sincere. The truth is a bird that hides  
its offspring out in the open seems too stupid to survive. 
The truth is a shorebird satisfied by a pond wastes its wings  
while its chicks blend with the bare, unremarked earth. 
 
My father dislikes surprises, startled by his own  
father’s heart gone quiet its thirty-ninth year.  
There’s a face he makes when the mower chokes 
over rabbits or turtles. He brakes for most critters 
he finds in time, before the harrow can claw 
across a body like a pastry cutter. The eggs 
must have come close to the McCormick’s tires   
as the killdeer took a running start, raised a wing, and called 
its own name. How do such traditions begin 
instead of birds that build a better home? 
Tractor to tail feathers, my father follows  
by the rules of a hunt he hands down to me: 
Believe the bird long enough to lead 
you both away, until it heals itself and flies. 
  
14 
 
 
 
Anthem for My Brother         
 
Back then we had the radio,  
jazz and justice coming in 
good by the time we hit the first 
state line, sun-up by the second. 
One lane turned to two 
and then six walls of traffic.  
Always a crash to crawl through. 
 
There was a sound in you  
that wanted out—the apical dominance 
of uncuttable hair—like the reach 
of Hendrix at Woodstock from the fuzzed speakers 
of the F150 with the spongy brakes. 
Something for the commuters in suits  
come to rest around us, you said. Patriotic. 
 
You turned it up too loud for talking, 
rolled down the glass, and pressed 
your heart as some stared. 
I’ll remember this the dawn you head 
all-the-way west with what you owned 
turtle-topped to your Pontiac, 
how bungee-corded together we were 
 
to our name: a box truck, bad brakes,  
the fruit heating up in back,  
a blue bank bag at your knee. All our father’s.  
What work was, what we had 
between us the years 
I mothered where none 
was needed. 
  
15 
 
 
 
Into the Dusk-Charged Air 
 
Before he dies, before the set begins, Billy Higgins 
sways to something. For almost sixty years, Buddy Rich 
and Max Roach have it out on a wobbly record. 
In Nashville, one-armed Rick Allen  
keeps up by the river. Terri Lyne Carrington 
an octopus in Baltimore. Philly Joe Jones, not to be swapped 
for Papa Jo, though they die days apart after swimming on the set. 
All the men who stole the sock cymbal from Ethel Minor. 
Pittsburgh, the Hill District at night, Roger Humphries 
putting some oeuf on it, Art Blakey’s Messengers. 
Elvin Jones always telling a good story 
with a punchline. Kenny Klook-a-mop Clark moving time  
from hi-hat to ride. Baby Dodds’s shimmy beat 
shifting six over four in his solos. Bill McKinney  
and his Cotton Pickers subbing Cuba Austin, 
who then lights up Gene Krupa. Kofi Ghanaba 
getting Tony Allen ready for Fela Kuti’s marathons. 
Rashied Ali gentle at the end of Coltrane. 
Dennis Chambers speeding past what Scofield  
has to say. Heels aching to see Vinnie Colaiuta with Herbie. 
Never a chance of Second Great Quintet Tony Williams, 
but “Million Dollar Legs” on cassette. Butch Trucks talking  
squash blossoms and Voltaire the day he goes. Lenny White  
with Chick in Return to Forever. Chico Hamilton 
with everyone. Chester Thompson 
after Zappa, Little Feat’s double set but no double 
pedals (what feet are for). Richie Hayward’s rock and shuffle  
before he passed. Richie Ramone at The Bayou in Georgetown. 
Jay Lane stomping swampflats for Claypool.  
Topper Headon before getting steady on heroin. Surviving  
his wife’s wound to his chest, Al Jackson Jr. takes five  
bullets later in his back. Perfect timing, Clyde Stubblefield  
and Jabo Starks pulling James Brown 
from the wings over and over. Omar Hakim  
fluttering around Bowie and Madonna. The other  
Knopfler brother. Jojo Mayer  
with Nina Simone singing paradiddle melodies.  
Stanton Moore and his marching 
drum tuned way, way, down… So what  
 
Neil Pert and Carter Beauford, sorry 
Ringo. Nothing 
like James Gadson in the pocket. 
Eh to Stewart Copeland; too many toys. 
16 
 
 
 
But goofy Keith Moon, that dynamite.  
Like Louis Hayes with Horace Silver 
and Cannonball. Citizen Tain 
with Michael Brecker before his death. Bonham’s  
Ludwigs in the basement. John Ware 
watching The Hawks 
when he was young. Levon at the helm. 
 
Insane Ginger Baker seated  
before his altars. Tito Puente’s 
papacy of sound. Steve 
Gadd giving all kinds of weather. 
  
17 
 
 
 
The Cathedral of Learning, after Orientation 
 
Cruel, that building, some doors gone 
to fluorescent lights and linoleum, 
key-stoned arches over lamp-lit wells 
of stairs down sudden others. Flights we ran 
up and counted wrong, testing 
transoms and tapping windows. 
Midnight-gentle. The summer your mother 
lived in a commune, you learned locks  
from someone who let you sit shoulder-close  
on southern porches, who kept you out of the rain. 
 
You brought two tools to college: 
a Leatherman and the light-grabbing flash 
of something I didn’t recognize 
the night we broke in the church  
for a belfry we never found.  
Thinking of thunder for cover 
through that first good storm, of ringing bells  
that weren’t there. After thirty-six stories,  
you can’t hide how quick the gate gives way. 
What happens when you try.  
 
I see you still on that rooftop 
with the lit grid of your life before you,   
leaning into lightning strikes, 
under balconies of rain. 
  
18 
 
 
 
Version Control 
 
The task of keeping consistent 
many versions 
organized by who held it last 
 
is run on your own changes. 
Revert, compare 
each point of failure 
 
of centralization 
 
(the question of saving 
what’s different) 
of backup for when 
 
you have the entire 
history of a place 
in one place and 
 
risk losing everything. 
  
19 
 
 
 
Proofreading 
 
I’m too afraid of permanence to tattoo  
or pierce my body, still apprehensive 
after urges long done, like pregnancies,  
one of them carried to term. What’s the language  
of love-child and bastard but yes and no 
to being who you’ve been. A new girl  
 
at work garbles copy for our agency.  
She has a kind of turned-up  
beauty that scares me. I’ve never seen a tattoo inside  
a mouth. She pulls down the tongue-side of her bottom lip, 
where a fish would be hooked. Instead, ink needled  
iridescent, the letters backwards  
 
like on an ambulance. Dirty South. I don’t know  
why she’s shown me.  
We’re both a bit unqualified for our lives. 
I’ve wanted my own mistakes gone  
un-made or penciled in. 
Know things I won’t. Tell them to me. 
  
20 
 
 
 
From a Glacier Since Retreated 
  
Ice bluer than snow and dirty as something pushed aside 
in a parking lot by a plow. I don’t need to see all 
the ice hoards while it inches along. Give me one photo 
or an avalanche. Waterfalls gone stony, shelves of ice and ice 
hung like sheet-rock, I am standing in a dry riverbed of cold 
I can feel in my metal fillings, in the steel fixed to my boots. 
I want to hear ice groan, twisted by underground rivers. 
My lips and fingers are purple. I’m alone on a glacier in the rain 
for a moment before the guide reappears. He’s annoyed  
he’ll have to take me back. I can’t breathe and he doesn’t want 
me to slow the others down. I’ve had this conversation with a man  
nine thousand miles away. Everything sounds farther 
in kilometers. The road signs say I’m traveling faster than I am 
as I head into Albert Town to touch the buttons of a payphone, 
snow on the Southern Alps pristine from this distance.  
  
21 
 
 
 
Oliver Poem 
 
Some things I remember  
differently, low-pile  
high-traffic carpet, lying 
under a table with our books— 
By the Great Horn Spoon!— 
windows bunker-narrow 
and long so the light 
had to angle down to us. 
Fifth grade, you’d say third, 
they would partner us up 
for reading ahead. 
For being hopelessly  
behind in the work we did 
when we felt like it. 
We were getting away 
 
with something. I remember 
after school, honey-butter  
bread, fried cheese 
in your mother’s skillet, 
cider hardening in the barn. 
Riding bikes around 
the schoolhouse your father  
fit with crown moulding 
one long summer, then cars. 
Ocean City, the AT, Maine.  
One of us followed  
the other to college. 
On my way to class  
I’d see you, no shirt  
and shoeless on the lawn,  
always high 
 
on something. I remember 
you singing Don’t  
sit under the apple tree 
with anyone else but me 
while you worked  
through my friends. 
I’m moving again. 
Your chicken-scratch notes  
line the books you lent me, 
gave maybe. 
Full of promise, promises 
22 
 
 
 
in rows across my desk. 
And behind breaking clouds 
climbs the slant of sun 
careful as any body  
through my window, 
unexpected but sure. 
  
23 
 
 
 
After Apple-Picking 
 
If it were five years ago I was dying,  
who would it have been 
who cared? That one boy 
I could count on to board the train 
Sundays I bought apples from my father at the market 
under the bridge. Or the surfer who got lost 
on the drive to the farm in the dark 
and didn’t want me after. 
Or the sculptor who made me something 
sadder than I knew.  
 
I have made mistakes.  
Thought it was going to rain  
just now, how the wind kicked up, 
the street trees losing their leaves 
over and over again. 
  
24 
 
 
 
Street Sweeping  
 (for Bernard) 
 
Praise the parking policewoman 
ticketing the black Bronco 
of my friend, my neighbor 
who died at home 
last night. Praise she who takes 
down his plates, his model and make, 
and later (if you believe 
in anything), trust a higher-up 
shall know his name, 
and there will be a summons. 
  
25 
 
 
 
Counting Poem 
 
Perhaps you, too, loved a grandmother 
who didn’t like people. Who loved many 
dogs and one wounding parakeet, who kept a bird 
clock by the dinner table. It chirped and trilled 
rather than chimed each hour the sunlight spun 
feathers and dog hair into your cold-cut  
lunch. Into Coca-Cola that was mostly ice. 
 
The clock, good company  
for Ralph the bird, for ten of the fifty  
years she lived without my grandfather. 
She gave it to me after a doctor appraised her 
blockages at ninety, ninety-five, and two  
one-hundred-per-cents. Her heart 
opened anyway at eighty-three 
 
to try to save something we still wanted. 
The natural symbol 
is inadequate now: hiding 
down the hall from my children calling, 
my forehead chilled by a city window 
where a bird sings and sounds 
a lot like eleven o’clock. 
  
26 
 
 
 
Bananas for Stu 
 
A few weeks before your wife left, you went  
feral, showed up to the houses of friends 
around dinner time 
 
and I was out front pulling tearthumb 
to put in a banana tree I’d traded for 
with late-August peaches at the market, 
 
when I still worked markets, 
the year it kept hot through fall 
and peaches stayed dense and true. 
 
I was digging to shift the amended soil 
where it could do the most good, 
at the bottom, away from my bad mood 
 
garden: wolfsbane, belladonna, rue— 
I’d been alone so long, 
trading for plants all summer— 
 
when you stopped by to say bananas 
wouldn’t bear and would die 
in a DC minute 
 
of plunging cold, but that was the point 
while I tried what came my way 
without a care for winter. 
  
27 
 
 
 
Second Marriage 
 
Mortar joints are intended  
to be sacrificial, sensitive 
toward the needs of historic 
brick and stone. Slaked  
lime and local sand 
destroy a structure  
if overly strong. Analysis  
requires interpretation. Repointing 
restores physical and visual 
integrity, or detracts 
and damages the masonry: 
 
Mortar as bedding 
rather than glue, 
pigmented by lampblack, 
brickdust, oystershells, 
coral sands and locks of hair. 
The joint is tooled  
when thumbprint hard  
to match existing bonds. 
New construction bloom  
fades through normal 
weathering.  
 
River-rounded sand, 
free from impurities, 
a handful is part void 
between the grains. Good mortar 
fills each emptiness. And vines  
weigh down one corner 
of the building, vines  
planted by another.  
I say they’ll drag 
the whole wall down. You  
swear they hold it up. 
  
28 
 
 
 
Who do you wish was with us? 
 
I’ve traveled a week without 
this Welsh rain. The sky’s held 
off for a moment unweighted 
by an umbrella. Remembering can 
inoculate the clouds a little while. 
 
The difference between a walk 
in the rain and getting caught 
in the rain is not the rain. 
A walled garden’s pressed name- 
plates in Latin remind me I’ll never learn. 
 
On the eighth day, rain 
drives me under the arches 
of an old Swansea tree  
whose name I don’t know. 
Magpies want the high, dry ground 
 
and a wood pigeon sinks  
its grip in my hair. 
I swat at startled feathers. The bird  
settles near, cautious, but stays 
out of the weather. 
  
29 
 
 
 
Tumbling Run 
 
We’d overstayed the weather in the woods, 
  a storm we knew was coming 
though we drove to Michaux without food or packs— 
  the Civic’s glove compartment full of drugs— 
 
I’ve never been up for the mission except as chaperone.  
  Shrooms I can’t eat because of stuff I know 
they grow in get the guys high while we hike the lower falls. 
  Snow doubles and I wonder about coming down. 
 
It’s getting dark or I’m dying, Wagner says. 
  George and O won’t talk at all. 
My brother’s prints loop off behind us: boulders 
  big as houses, sloped roofs, no doors, 
 
holding left foot  right  and I see 
  him crumpled below in each gully. Catch 
my breath and follow his billy-goat scramble  down 
  and back up in the slow going of the not-brave, 
 
of the congenitally sober. Alone. 
  Call his name, dulled 
half-dark by anger, burned down to blue 
  warmth of worry. I’d always 
 
hounded his adventures and brought him back when 
  I thought he’d needed it. When he does 
answer, he’s so close I reach out in moonlight held aloft 
  by a veil of pines and touch his outstretched hand. 
 
Because he’d become a tree in a field full of trees and tried 
  to do what the rest were doing; as I try to make sense 
of what sisters are supposed to do, no one to look up to, no one looking up to 
  me later, years after the long childhood spent rehearsing losses.     
  
30 
 
 
 
Kevlar and Calfskin 
  
The first time I see a rock maple drum shell without its hardware and heads, 
I think I'm looking at a tree ring. I think I'm looking at a year lifted from a nest 
of years, one self-contained circle, a record of the wet and dry seasons. 
I reason the tree’s other rings have become other drums. A trap set of years 
  
surrounds my father while he and I figure what’s wrong with his snare. 
Eight gut-strings wound with wire rest in his lap like links of chain mail. 
He dismantles an instrument with the confidence of a man who builds things, 
who trusts his tools, who never loses any pieces and will re-make them whole.     
  
I get to listen to his busy-work banter if I clean lug nuts and tension rods. 
He says about drums, there's Kevlar and calfskin, not much in between.  
Dad relies on bulletproof durability. Tough new drumheads  
sink black holes into the carpet. Part of me might disappear inside 
   
should I reach for them. Without its skins, the drum's silence is a kind of nakedness. 
Parallel grain runs the wood like ledger lines in a composition book—  
like lines and spaces without their music on. I record everything my father says 
when we work like this. Two drumheads, get it? Not much in between. 
  
It’s years before we all leave him. It’s years before I learn drums aren't tree rings, 
before I see one made from a plank ripped from its tree, unstraightened 
by steam and steel, and sanded into a perfect circle meant to amplify. 
I can’t yet differentiate shaping from warping. I laugh like Kevlar and calfskin 
  
and emptiness are all things I’ve long known. I laugh like I know my father well. 
I’ve blown back the tiny feelers in my ears to be close to him. Asleep 
on the quilt that muffles his kick drum, I think this is love, my heart bucking 
and stumbling to match step with the mallet striking, finding its own music. 
  
31 
 
 
 
Crayfish 
 
Because water caught the light  
like flesh on the lid of a tin can, 
Conewago Creek rose in narrow locks  
and pooled the sunset.  
I climbed after it to the ridge 
where a spring the size of a child’s bath 
began from nothing. Water 
occurred to a stack of rocks 
until the damp spilled under leaves, 
unnoticed, along the same logging road  
I wandered each day of my childhood  
that I’d care to remember.  
 
I saw a beauty I wanted to enlarge 
and did the wrong thing: I returned 
with a shovel. You have to understand, 
above the woods, where the orchard clung 
to its cleared south-eastern slope, 
fruit trees were dying in their rows. 
My mother had paid a water witch from town 
to site a new well. The dowser, 
wife of the well-digger,  
walked with a peach branch balanced  
in her palms all morning, and divined what would be 
a poor spot for her husband to dig. 
 
Not telling about the spring made it mine 
to ruin with improvements. 
I numbed my hands for days 
piling rocks and emptying the bowl 
of old leaves and silt. Things that had lived there 
dried on the bank. The spring bled mud 
to heal its waters 
of my digging. I sliced  
a crayfish in half before I stopped. I’d heard  
they could trace freshwater to its start.  
It died among the rounded stones 
with its face turned toward the source.  
  
32 
 
 
 
Against Elegy 
 
You learned this somewhere, 
  the five mirrors 
 of loss. It’s not what I want 
 
for my children. 
  I’m going now. 
 I don’t wish to be followed. 
 
Give me all I have  
  before I’m gone 
 and I’ll divvy it up with you.  
 
Grant me buttermilk 
  in a cup 
 of the living world. 
 
Allow me bread 
  that’s risen 
 a few times, and slowly. 
 
Where I’ve been  
  with you  
 less in twos and threes 
 
than lonely, be alone 
  at my end’s 
 unbuilding. 
  
33 
 
 
 
Pruning 
 
You have to open up the tree 
to the idea of bearing, center out, 
sun to the lower branches. Slice at 
suckers until your forearms ache. 
The adventitious limbs are whip-thin 
and incapable of peaches. 
Cull them before the sap swells 
everything green and pink. Any child 
knows what to keep and where to cut 
the upstarts. Underfoot, 
they bloom for days behind you, unchosen 
among the roots where they lay their petals down. 
  
34 
 
 
 
Hillwater  
 
 
I. 
 
I’d step off the bus and want the words 
out of any music. I liked the wind’s rush 
down the orchard’s slope, the cattle gate  
swung wide to the woods and my ears  
ringing. My skin 
dulled the day’s high blush. 
Everything slowed and opened. 
I went first by my eyes, mindful  
for rattlers, second by my hearing  
for the same. An insect hum from school 
could linger like a colony 
for hours in the brain.  
Once the forest floor started speaking 
   like a small far-off fire. 
I moved a broad-leaf brown’s worth 
of blanket to find the shape of a fawn 
in beetlebacks that curved their eyelights up 
at me. My whole life, I had the good sense  
to keep looking for the things I found. 
A hide beetle is named for what it cleans  
and keeps whole, the kind kept  
to expose museum bones and get the middle 
gone. I walked the fawn’s flat length  
in the woods before learning 
the rustling meant a river of nothing 
underfoot.  
     Above, the devil in its acre: 
brambles I remember best  
for failing to thrive. Every farm 
has one, untenable rock tripping up the silted hill, 
sogged or cracked dry, wind-fallowed. 
Some plants like to suffer, and you should  
put them there. And my mother, sister, and I, 
our habit of debt-hungry men 
in their vineyards wild and tame, 
eating grapes to give up the wine 
harvest after middling harvest. Autumn  
sons and vernal daughters; careless fun, 
then broken waters.  
         Remember 
burning the mortgage by the barn door? 
35 
 
 
 
Cars in the cornfield, campfires, 
dances all night on fallen arches.  
The exhaust of red trucks running  
still sends summer’s lemon-sugar hands to me. 
How my first love heaved his heartbroad chest  
under his apron when I was showy with a second child. 
Pressing two sides of a tablecloth  
with the tops of our thighs, all our decisions  
neat between us. His wife a lot like me, heavy  
where I used to be. It can take twenty years 
to know a thing you’re told.  
           Over and over 
I returned to the trees I understood, retying  
timber boundaries’ blue flags that girded those I held  
and looked up to. Old-growth gone anyway, toppled  
and torn across re-sheared logging roads, 
pungent stumps left to read and count out 
my birth in concentric rings. There is a name 
for the creek made from a spring that tumbles  
next to its empty bed. You’ll hear it 
if you go alone, or with one willing  
to say nothing a while: Conewago, 
Conewago, hillwater  
swept to falls in Lenape.  
                
 
II. 
 
Catholics crossed  
the valley here in wagons  
to build their brick box, hang thick glass  
wed by lead. Valley of The White Squaw  
is named for Mary Jemison, whose family was scalped, 
whose cornsilk hair saved her  
from having that part taken. Beauty 
can protect like that if one wants it 
to live and is better armed than another. 
They lined us up in elementary school 
with our backs against the board, 
then culled the dark and short-haired. 
Leaving bucktoothed Tina and bucktoothed me... 
   This tittering spool of yellow 
-bellied cruelties I could have stopped 
if I’d better known the ugly curled inside. 
Always listening for danger, waiting  
each footfall out on leaf-deep hills 
36 
 
 
 
in case anything poisonous cared  
to lead. New-spawned copperheads 
the worst for their unregulated woundings. 
I heard a rattlesnake just once, one boot raised 
from the dry creek’s wiregrass, 
but the sound shook the knuckled oaks  
and swaying pines. I sweat 
out the bone-knocked voice, thrown and echoed back. 
     Next steps are often 
treacherous. The woodsman’s son crosses  
the road at twelve to quit clearing our apple brush. 
He’s felled a tree on his father. I’ll fall for all four  
brothers of the Mennonites with the accurate family 
name of Baum. Back then, you’d notice my father’s  
Reid-red hair, our highland shyness, 
my mother’s Argento silver threading her  
foothill braids. We are not far from the naming 
of this place. Bears come for our grapes 
from Bear Mountain. Narrows Road 
is so. The waterwheel along Mill  
Run has nowhere else to go. 
           Any path 
leads to my grandmother alone 
and sunk in her lumpy blue chair. 
Oxygen flows audible through the house 
from silver tanks to greening tubes 
meeting under her nose. I’d kneel 
on the carpet to interrupt the TV 
so she’d say something sweet: I see you 
have the troubles with your hair 
or I spent today with your pictures 
and threw out the worst. Stacks of things  
between us we don’t understand, her wedding 
book on top.    
         We don’t discuss 
my grandfather gone to his girlfriend’s 
condo for the weekend. What do you call 
a woman led on fifty years  
alongside a man and wife? A town beauty  
is stuck hillside. Her granddaughters 
lack town or trousseau, though my sister  
kisses the four boys next door and finds winter  
trips for her life to grow. Grandmother 
laughs at her black thumb in the garden.  
She praises my sister’s hands, 
elegant and poised above keys or strings.  
37 
 
 
 
My sister takes music wherever she goes. 
 
                   
III. 
 
Our family ends  
before we each start our own. Our brother returns 
from college to hear how to run the land,  
money like water pulled up and put down  
by the roots. More than we could tend, always more 
to grit and pretend. Our mother 
counts out crackers at the table, busy being thin.  
She takes lovers my brother’s age by spring,  
when long mounds of berries need gathered and sold.  
My father walks the fence-line all morning.  
With three shells in his left breast pocket, 
he finds nothing in the woods, 
then his wife and a worker in the barn— 
 
If you do not make your life, 
you’ll be given the one you have 
over and over. Suppose  
you were raised by a lady who fell  
in love with everyone. You’d be cruel 
too, taught to hunt by your father’s wanders, 
the first time a truck hit its brakes in the street 
so a man could have to tell you, you’re something 
perfect. Imagine trying to stop 
what you were, deep outside 
looks you couldn’t control. My mother’s 
beauty was a craziness she had  
so long she gifted it to strangers. 
Time has given it a name. 
 
Some questions beg for an answer, 
some answers beg for the same. 
I lost the fed-beetle fawn when I searched again. 
I thought there’d be bones, or winged 
generations of the scavengers 
I’d heard. I’ve never so faithfully 
tracked back my travel. 
Such a small death; I think I meant 
to bring a piece home. Instead, all around, 
a shock of white I’d waited my life to see: 
the fluted necks of Indian Pipe, 
sun-shunning flowers peeking  
38 
 
 
 
from the ground, curled like lampposts,  
greenless ghosts nearly glowing.  
 
There is one place I will ever know 
and I’ve seen it for the last time, 
covered in plants that sow themselves 
to the highfield channery loam. 
There is a field full of tiny bells 
that stays silent over the dead. 
Ghost flowers reach for their living  
from the tangled roots of others. 
I almost wish I could have shown you  
and the children I would’ve liked 
to dip in the creek’s deep spring. 
May there be logic  
to such blooming. I stood a long time  
before knowing to leave them there.  
 
  
39 
 
 
 
Tending 
 
Better to be buried in the season of your own yard’s flowers. 
Though most of us, yourself included, 
go in the month of unsold roses. 
 
Better to be finite in your longing. I wasn’t one 
you woke for at the end. 
This is handholding work. 
  
Sitting on a carpet that smells like 
everything you tried to get out of it. 
There’s a message I can’t erase: 
 
My sister says, quick now. They put you in a room 
with the blinds down. I’ll do the viewing 
but do not attend  
 
the dying. Why take my body from yours  
while yours lived 
tethered to the breathing machines? 
 
On the other side of a wall  
that used to be a door, 
I hold up this book with my name on it. 
  
Best to be remembered 
by the church-yard’s light across the valley, one that comes on at dusk  
like a bird I’ve seen all my life and not heard.  
 
40