After he broke my best friend Frankie Williams’ glasses, 
I slammed Ricky Richter in the solar plexus. 
Then the Williams family drove upstate for the weekend.

That night, with news of Frankie’s sudden death,
the building’s mothers massed in our living room.
He was Catholic, the mirrors weren’t covered.

I never could explain how I felt
at ten: Frankie, identical twin of Bobby, dead.
I knew their differences as I knew

the smell of roses rising from Mrs. Zinnie’s garden,
the piano gleaming in her window, an American flag draped over the sill,
all the courtyard faced with red brick just blocks from the Hudson.

Even as I lacked understanding,
I meant to hurt no one.
Sometimes I’ve known what to do.

In Arroyo Seco where the setting sun
threaded through cholla like a raveling spool,
I told Filemon, the viejo,

if he ever laid a hand on my dog or raised his gun
I’d kill him
& he shut the door in my face.

In Flatbush the three sisters’ bodiless heads out a window
gazed upon me double digging the earth.
Come summer they asked

why my blue & lavender hydrangeas
flourished while nothing grew in their unplanted dirt.
I offered, You can’t leave everything to God.

In Bay Ridge false-faced Mrs. Cassidy complained when I tossed
a ball in my room & when I told her to shut up
my father forced me to apologize to that religious woman.

Still I haven’t always known what to say
or the difference between right & wrong.
I shed no tears over Frankie’s casket.

In South County curious neighbors wondered why sticks tied with rags
were stuck in my garden & when I shrugged
they departed downcast, sprigs of cilantro in hand.

The woman in the snow in Santa Fe,
her sisters helping her from the car, shower cap covering her bald head,
raincoat over her bathrobe open,

robe open too, as she stepped
carefully toward the dark end of the house.
I said nothing.

How romantic it seemed
coming west to the Four Corners
settling by the Animas, the Florida, Los Pinos;

like Henry Hudson sailing up the bay
before his crew mutinied, casting him overboard
to disappear in the river named after him.

I once saw Stanley telling Ollie that honesty is the best policy.
That wasn’t square. If only Tom Paine were laid to rest with honor,
not simply thrown in a farm field, how different America would be.

Seven llamas stand in a Colorado meadow.
Brown-headed goats & greasy sheep shimmer on the county road.
In the next house I live in cardinals will again arrive late

& I’ll wait to eat until they eat.
I want my neighbors to love me & I’ll love them back.
We’ll barbeque chicken, I’ll play Muddy Waters loud

& we’ll watch the birds flying back & forth between our yards,
the fences made of sycamore sticks or lilac.

Originally appeared in Connotation Press.