FAMILY MATTERS

...

1

Family matters break on the small house

as if the winds and the tides bring them,

as if no human desire is moving them

across the floor, through doors, or telephones.

Those collected there are like dreamers

on a secluded beach who don't know

of hurricanes that come and go and leave

their deadly scars, reminders, like the offal

the screaming birds leave on the coastal rocks.

...

2

If there is happiness, they make it as they go.

They cannot look within the whirl of feelings

for the logic of enduring solicitude.

Or, if they can, nothing will appear there,

and they will remain out at the edge of it,

where all that seems possible is possible.

FAMILY MATTERS

3

Everything circulates so rapidly anyway

that the unpleasantness of compressed moments

together, the fleshly insult mutually conferred,

dissipates, or transposes, and nothing

remains, save a certainty of a slanting ease

never to be seen, impossible of proof.

...

4

They feel a poignancy only because

they half-perceive that the unique events

of the house rise from the completely common.

Where it appears there is more there is less

and where less, more. In matters of family,

clarity may be wished for, not expected.

3......