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Driveway
Like the little lines that all at once appeared around your mouth and eyes- faintly placed, implacably- out of the street's deep arc the drives of pale gray gravel fan into family yards. All of which was orchard twenty years ago, and the lumber neither cut nor cured which is this house. Twenty years: a closetful of movies- birthdays, anniversaries- which you, accruing the lengthening tapes, played night after night on the screen. But this was the final New Year: the tree, dismembered, forever green in its carton, and you backing the last time down the snowy drive, rolling it up on the reel of yourself, as if you would find, when your rear wheels hit asphalt, not tax money, stitches, braces, hours floundering in the wedding bed, but chaste earth, blossoms falling, some bird.