Poem

Cabin

I dream lately of a cabin in the north woods.

Somehow I had built it myself

Unskilled as I am;

Modest, humble, unadorned.

Gray slatted wood, shingled roof,

A helix of smoke from the chimney,

My dog half awake on the narrow front porch.

I’d have my books, my papers, my pens.

All the time I had left, simply unspooled

In a repeat loop of sighs and shivers.

There was a mountain stream down the hill in back

And plenty of berries and nuts.

One day I’d see her coming through the trees

Not some random hiker but her.

She had pieced together the route from 

Scraps of poems and fragments of life

I’d had left behind in my wake.

She claimed to be seeking me

And stumbled upon this modest sanctuary.

The dog would barely stir.

She wouldn’t have to knock

For I had been scanning the tree line

Waiting, from a rocker on the porch

Or peering through the window when the words dried up,

Hoping for her to just show up one fine afternoon.

Although I didn't deserve it.

Like a naughty boy who gets dessert.

The dream fades at this point

For what follows belongs in a home

Not some rustic cabin in the woods 

Without water or electricity or money or fame.

The dream fades when I am found.

The alarm bleats, someone is shaking my arm.

I wake, I have been found,
Lost no more.

2/29/20

poem

Late Snow

It was a rough damaging winter,

Enough to leave marks

That the warmth of Spring won't easily smooth over.

Sometimes a March snow

Is the soft white salve needed

For the first phase of healing.

All those muddied rutted tracks

In the yard where cars

Veered off course 

And churned the grass.

It isn’t a blanketing blizzard,

Just a light gauze dressing

(Likely to melt by late afternoon)

To cover the shallow wounds

Before the real work of repair begins.

Shovels and boots and rakes,

Sweating under a hot May sun.

I’ll have to run to the nursery for seed.

2/28/20

Poem

Elemental

Dust and leaves swirled around my feet

In the middle of a summer cyclone.

My body was buffeted but I hardly swayed

For even the wind ignores the likes of me.

I went for a morning swim in the big surf

Off an abandoned beach,

After everyone else had joined the evacuation,

But the roiling ocean refused to get me wet.

When the house was burning down

I doused myself in gasoline

But couldn’t feel the heat

While dazed gray ash fluttered against my face.

In the middle of the earthquake

I was the only thing that didn’t shake

While the walls all collapsed

And the sidewalks cracked.

For I was the fault

And the eye of the hurricane

The tenth of a degree before the flash point

I have been the empty void

That flees just as it gets filled,

The vacuum of space that exists

Only when there’s nothing there.

I am the low dark clouds that promise to make mud

Of your finely raked pile of dirt.

Just you wait!

I’m coming for you, to devastate

This bonhomie of false tranquility.

You were the cataclysm that unmoored my ship.

Our thundering hearts remain as aftershocks

2/16/20

Poem

Orphans

Estrangement is worse than being an orphan.

All the missed Christmases,

The empty seats,

The cards in the mail,

Social media stalking

My how she’s aged.

Righteous rage is always

Followed by a funereal silence.

Ostracization, ex communication,

Exile to the realm of the wronged. 

Church doors locked, 

Keep your hands out of the holy water.

An orphan was never rejected;

His parents are just dead.

A blurred picture of mom in a locket,

Dad’s cologne, that last trip to Hilton Head.

It’s worse this way,

The living undead absence 

Of your mom or your dad.

Maybe you’re just waiting 

For the sad news to arrive.

You’ve already written lovely eulogies 

That your siblings, by god, will never

Let you stand behind an altar and deliver.

When it's over you can write the story,

As the orphan conjures an imagined dad,

A phantasmagorical mother

Wrapped up tidy and nice;

Proud of you boy, good luck, good night.

Or maybe you're just waiting

For your own inevitable fall

Flat on your back

Nowhere to go

No one to expect

Except for them, old mom and dad---
The eternal recurrence of helpless infancy.
At the very last, the real thing,
the old familiar faces looming over you,
Smiling in shimmering brilliancy.

2/6/20

Poem

Template

Gallbladder socked in like a bullet in bark.

Liver left cupped where I carved it out.

Oozes and seeps from the raw surface

But I have tricks for that.

Put it in a bag.

Pull it out.

Plop it in formalin.

It’s not a story to tell

Around the dinner table when your 

Wife and kids ask, “how was your day?”

(Actually just the wife,

The kids have other things to say).

You can’t take it home

Or display it on the mantel,

Not even the yellowed corn kernel stones.

Rinse it out.

Close her all up.

Dictate what you did

Before the details dissolve

In the solvent of repetition.

You’ll never come round these parts again.

Next case same as the first

Just in a completely different universe.

They’re all the same

While insisting on a silly particularity.

I use a template except for the parts

You have to free hand from memory.

Measure out a perfect box.

Now draw absence.

Sketch your best guess of being.

Then finish it off with love.

2/6/20