Poem

Receipt

My dad used to always show me the receipts;

Birthday gifts, hotel and restaurant bills.

He liked to show how much he’d spent

As if the rows and columns of numbers meant

All the important things could be counted.

But numbers don't mean much when you’re nine or ten.

It takes a while to understand how much things cost.

You just know that something is given and something is owed,

That all things have a price

And payment is due even when the cherished things are lost.

One time I needed envelopes last minute

For the Valentine’s Day party at school.

We stopped at a drugstore but all they had 

Left was a giant box of business envelopes.

There were way too many

And they were way too big

For my little bundle of pink and red cards.

It all seemed like such an expensive waste.

(Mom ran out later and got the proper kind.)

When he dropped me off at home

I clutched the crumpled receipt and wept,

Like Daisy Buchanan rifling through

Gatsby’s closetful of beautiful shirts.

Another time, just before the big split,

I slid my only twenty dollar bill under his pillow

Folded up in a note where I’d written

Kid things like I'm so sorry daddy and please don't leave.

But he never said anything about it.

Maybe mom saw it first and threw it away in anger;

Who knows?

I never got my money back

And I never got a receipt.

5/6/20

Poem

Poem #12

A poem always starts from a flash of color out of the corner of your eye. Then a mad scramble for a pen, some scraps of paper. Close your eyes, the racing heart, the do or die or missing it altogether. So the words come like puzzle pieces lost under cushions. Piece it back together again. Pastiche. Collage. It fades fast. And there always comes a point in a poem where you lose the scent. Not sure where you’re going, what it was supposed to have meant. It can’t be avoided. If you don’t get here you haven’t gone in deep enough. If you get stuck, then crumple it up. It may have just been a desert mirage all along. Either way, in the end, it all works out. This half slip of paper, marked up in black script, so light and clean and trifling, is the thing you’ve fetched from the depths of the oily dark abyss.

4/16/20

poem

Lost at Sea

Trapped in this drafty house

I can feel lost at sea,

Capsized from my couch,

Another midnight mid-Atlantic tempest.

The hours are equatorial doldrums

In which I pace and ponder and nothing gets done.

There is a scurvy resurgent that even oranges can’t sate.

The mind reels and the bones too easily break.

Does the wave even see the shore?

Is it worried about what’s coming?

Or is this just me seeing a wave

From a porthole in my home,

Unfurling itself in rhythmic drift

Before it falls over in a splash of foam.

The wave is the one that swims

While I am the flailing white froth:

I should have seen the rocks before the cliffs.

4/11/20

poem

Infested

Backyard lined with dying trees, 

The lifeblood sucked out, devoured

By the bronze birch borer disease.

The leaves don’t come

Anymore and the shade they cast

Is no longer the blue cooling canopy;

Stick-like slashes of black

Hatchings across the grass.

The storms come, strong winds

Snap the distressed branches.

I am left to fetch fallen 

Fragments, pieces, alone, the next day.

Piles and piles of rotted brokenness

Stacked to dry out in future suns;

Kindling for an indeterminate blaze.

Now is the time to thicken your bark,

Reinforce the shields that have thinned.

You can’t afford to look away or yield;

Even the smallest things can get under your skin.

4/10/20

poem

Thirst

I denied my desire to drink

Once I realized thirst

Could not be quenched.

Instead I set aside
Small cups of water
To coat my brittle lips
Before they cracked and bled.

Tiny room with a desk,

Small spiral ring notebooks,

Dense with cramped script.

Small portions had always been enough

To keep me fed:

The things I can grip

And carry when I fled.

I dead-ended deep in a forest

Up against cliffs of shale and slate

Sponged with brackish moisture,

So swollen they dripped.
Closed my eyes and and lifted my face
To the water that comes from stone

And the moss cushioned my weight.

I have always been mostly water
And water never gets wet.

All the cups must be tipped.

The beaded puddles that spread

Across my varnished desk

Coalesce, fathomless:

Deep enough to dive head first.

3/26/20

poem

Self Isolation

It once seemed

So far away---

Wuhan, hazmat

White tents, N95 masks---

But now it’s here,

It’s everywhere,

And not just a meme.

This time virus goes viral.

The numbers trickled in and then popped.

We’re scrolling our phones and laptops.

Small cliques, family clusters

Scattered from great gatherings.

Drink plenty of water

Check for fever

Wash your hands

Get caught up on your sleep.

Read Boccaccio and

Avoid the din of voices.

For the longest time,I guess,

I've been practicing for this moment.

Well versed in the art of social distancing.

Judicious isolation

---- not alone.

It’s always been an act

Of self preservation.

3/14/20

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