Columbus
Day
Ropes creak like
stays of a ship
as she climbes beside me
into the hammock.
And the wind
cuts through treetops
scattering us
sharp as saltwater
with the cherry-tree's
yellow leaves.
High clouds,
the helmsman's dream
of distant continents
in the map of a sky,
I hold her
against the blue
and she, she shades her eyes,
searching–
always searching
for that gull.
|
Dress
Rehearsal
Just summer, a breeze
sweeping off-lake
stirs up wheat-grass by shore,
and through long open screens,
sweetens the dark theater
as we stand and applaud.
The director doesn't turn his face
from the table, flipping back through
the bright pages of his score.
As headlights begin to sweep
the lot's shadowed edges,
we follow a long line up the hillside
to our car. I roll down
my window,
too thrilled to speak.
Every movement reverberates
with the last chorus. We all are content.
Crunching gravel, we ease to the road.
Then, something jumps,
a faun, pale, and clipped
by the car ahead,
he flares through our lights
then falls, thrashing
the tall grass in the ditch. |
Last Words
The last words in cockpits
before the crash
are comforting to read, somehow.
Says one pilot "sorry," only sorry--
No profanity the transcript
politely excised, or "O God!"
or name gasped.
Regret alone
that nothing in him
suffices to push the plane
from its stall.
In another, says the
pilot to his co-
"Cleared that Cessna?"
"Hope so," with a chuckle.
Then a sound marked impact,
then the crash.
.
You and I, our last words
un-transcribed,
the only evidence
are final, smiling snapshots.
Your eyes say nothing,
or that nothing
is left to fear. |
At
Seventeen
Startled she who had all morning
sat nervous while a swell of sun-cream
lapped her stocking feet,
stood at the knock.
Her arms flashed up, delicate hands
framed clipped-black shadows across
her white dress, and in deeper hues
her luminous skin shone rounding
violet flecked eyes
even as standing thrust
her face and shoulders into shade.
Startled at his wry smile–
At seventeen she'd lain
naked on her bed,
in such shade
door shut to kitchen sounds,
the quiet cleaving
of her father's knife,
her long whey fingers
rested just above her dent of a navel.
With each breath,
the rise and fall of dull nipples,
and the slim, short quivering
of coarse black hair– waiting:
only now, she understood
for what.
|
Straw
What is there to do,
but leave another message
on her machine,
take what's left of the sun
on my back,
wander out to the field,
and tromp the new-mown grass?
So aimless
I stagger through sky,
and later trudge back home.
A sudden pain in my foot
stops me at the stairs.
I tug off my sneaker–
a piece of straw
has worked itself
sharply
into my sole.
|
Digging
All the night
you are driving
your iron rod into dirt
at the foot of my bed;
wherever soil yields
to your thrusts
you know you find
unmarked graves.
Half-asleep
in the marrow-wasting dark
I pray. Let me be
part of the sample
you exhume.
Let me be lain
on the cool table
bone to bone.
Infer from telltale marks
the infectious vector,
the malnourishment
that doomed my soul.
All night, sheets
cold as graveyard earth,
your metal
will find me not.
I wake
from the dream
still interred. |
Midsummer's
Eve
From Clee to heaven the
beacon burns,
...
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again
-- A.E. Houseman
In high grass on our ridge,
men work brush,
as silhouettes in the slaking light
hefting their black tangles to the heap.
Fireflies glimmer the humid-green hillside
with silent, strobing chatter.
Someone, Dad perhaps,
stabs a blue finger of propane
into the nested branches
as I fill a white cup
from the water-keg
a nascent fire burns its rim.
This time of year, the Inuit
twisted a net of sinew
and sweeping the air, coaxed
the sun to slow its terrible decline.
And the farmers, who burned
bushels of jungle creepers
under the glittering nightly eyes
of beasts, met the parched season
with a maiden sacrifice,
kept alive long as possible
in her agony– her every tear
prophesy of rain. |
Physical
Trajectories
The sixth-grade boys
race from school,
rockets in hand.
Trapped inside yesterday
they had traced the intersection
of angle and velocity,
physical trajectories
of ideal projectiles
in rough pencil
over graph-paper pale-blue
as the sky.
Now in the downy light
of first period, scrambling,
they carom over asphalt,
plow into cold grass,
their voices echoing the morning–
Who first will slap his rocket
to the pad, and what
will be the flash
that sends them
hurtling? |
Anniversary
A little cloudy,
but like any other day.
The red-poppies have let fall
their petals
a long time. Now the fields
rife with ragweed,
the faintest whisper
thick with pollen;
the bleeding hearts
yellow in the stalk,
their flowers withered
before the rain,
and I without you
am much the same. |