I Remember Reading Andre Dubus

I remember reading Andre Dubus
to you two somewhere off I–93 in the Notch.
We’d pulled in and it was dark already.
We were driving home from Boston.
Too tired for a fire, we popped the top on the camper and settled in.

You had his book and so with a flashlight I read two selections for you.
I recall the first story being lengthy and
I recall feeling like I had been his subject for already too long.
Though, peering back now I see I had better stories for him when it comes to the heart and the mind
and the pieces we hold on to
like the birches’ roots grip the granite
amid the brown bears and lichens.
She and me and you.
Karmit was to be my wife.
I was elected as the suitor so she could earn her green card and I guess I would have gained citizenship in Israel.
Karmit Even–Zur. The name’s as good as what came with it.
She was stunning, with moles that perched on the shoulders, the neck, the thigh, like little birds on basswood.
The second story was shorter.
I didn’t know then that I had a place, like Dubus, to fit us all into.
That peculiar attraction to the trinkets that hang from rear view mirrors,
the cassettes they love, the way they wrote letters,
the names of their cats and
how they look like infants when they cried.
Mountain, her middle name, she cried like saturated moss,
crisp tears that dropped out,
a natural product of the weight,
a single stream flooded now and again by a single drop,
its path determined already
through reddened cheeks and ears that were red too.
But she didn’t cry about stuff that Dubus would use.
Mountain cried for her Old Man in the Mountain who sat in that great North, and for the silver–haired widow and the knees of her youth.
Perhaps I choose now not to remember if I caused those teardrops at times.
I finished the story and the flashlight was put out.
Below us, Karmit breathed the rhythm of sleep and
that last story, for her,
must have slipped from waking to sleeping life halfway.
Mountain, always a good study, had listened through to the end and
I was taking notes for a life later,
when the maple would be there for me,
the pitch black night there too, like a tarp,
keeping dry the memories to be burned later,
when winter would be a desire,
and pine nettles would be a mood:
the marriage never happened, the sun woke us like he does,
the windows were coated with the moisture of living for then,
and Dubus sat, doggy–eared, on the dashboard,
content on having guarded his trove,
as the dander of experience gathered like snow drifts
and I planned futures from pasts.