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Five Poems
by
His Eightieth Birthday
We have been summoned —obedient children, as we have been summoned before, to a kitchen table or a campfire in the dark. The air, heavy again like the old air, is filled with slap-angry parables of hard work and money. We are always deficient in one or the other.
Now we come, aging sons and daughters, and his new step-children, dragging his heirs and useless gifts to another table. His hard-packed rage having taken a new direction, the enemy is one more disloyalty— a bloody ire crusts his brain, damming up the vessels of his heart.
The grandchildren have been warned— how his eyes flash the message, his lips riddle the shape of a word, only the essential fury remembered, and the consonants of fuck, the absolute meaning of god dammit. We are practicing the simplest conversations.
Coveting
It is never a straight line— this mid-summer meandering.
The dog is let out in the night to drink the cool air, but takes up
the scent of raccoon, sets his memory aside, lost in the drive.
So it is with the man who loves his living and his wife, but dreams
in the starless night, the clean face of the neighbor girl, married child
with one of her own, her tan back puritan straight, his eagerness in her smile.
Theirs is a labyrinth of dark streets named for the oak, the sycamore,
pendulous branches sweeping the cul-de-sacs and alleys.
He can’t know if the night will bring on a chill or the dew
turn slippery and black. All he can do is hurry his pace or stand in the moment.
A zigzag cuts the summer sky. Will he let the dog go or bring the dog home?
White Sounds
Winter is the cleanest world I know, haiku against the blue snow— the apt word, the sparse imagined, each measured stroke an ink-thinned mark against the shortened hours, inspired by the light—its silent showers.
Painting the Bridge
Evening fire is everywhere— across the separated sky, pressed against glass in every west-facing window. It coats the steel bridge, the tips of birds, and rings your hair like a flamed halo.
This is the unsulfured match no one wants to extinguish. We wait for its quick gift—the blazing aerial show, hard red drops stippled on the river, a lipstick kiss swooning in the flash, a cutout city drawn closer and closer.
Threads of a Summer Morning
Words are growing out over the bow of the boat, thick words about coffee—too strong, too weak, the piss-poor fishing. A red thermos drips on a tackle box. The lake is laid flat, hammered silver, same dull tone as the voices that needle me awake along the window sill, across the bedroom floor. In the northwest corner of the picture, a dark man threads a night crawler with deliberation, right down its soft belly and thinks about what he will say to his boss this morning, who sits under his kitchen light in a blue-white shirt, rattling his paper, sucking annoyance and hot coffee. Raw threads hang from his cuff. He picks at them, knowing no one has seen them—no one cares, neither his wife nor the girl at the laundry who is stretching across her warm bed, wrapped in a last touch before the alarm sweeps her out into the summer air.
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