You squint the way one eye still aches
You squint the way one eye still aches was shaped by rising water as it flattens out in the silence that wants you to make good without asking why or what for –it’s how moonlight works, half disguised as tears to soften the ground half as a sea that long ago left all these bottom stones uncovered as the mist where their breath used to be –somebody owes them all something though you come by to pay down one that still has its arms around you is pulling you closer to shore by wiping the foam from your lips –you darken the Earth to get a better look and with child-like...
Read MoreWalter, Pierre, Tim, Howard
We had a good rain all night, their names crashing down from the past. Thirty years later from up here in this bedroom window, I see across the wide lawn where everything in these gardens goes on at such a fast pace… the lilacs, peonies, roses. The new delight, purple phlox blooming late in the cool mountain air. For some time now I’ve not spoken their names, young men who hungered for the world they were losing, and what in their leaving, they took. They died without funerals. We gave away their clothes to Goodwill, all of them we outlived. At the time did not know how much we...
Read MoreBearing Loss
What kindling love is this that sanctifies the earth with memories proliferating like the grave turning of a second birth? What enterprising arms disseminate their charms like seeds on fallow fields to function as a lavish yield for autumn’s harvest? Suspended on such tensile roots, they bring forth fruits which thrive on sappy juices of their germinating tree – if just to nurture offshoots for posterity. But what use cultivating heartbreak’s fertile soil, that promises abundance from such husbandry? Tears scarcely save the desiccated oak, nor does grief breathe life into a...
Read MoreReading My Father
By December with your death not yet a habit, a box of books arrives that you asked my sister to pack up for me. On the top I pull out Raccontini Italiani, open to the dedication page, notes scrawled in Italian in your curly cursive, the blue ink of a felt tip pen now faded. I placed distance between us that last year, not prepared to let what was happening to you reach me, just allowing bits and pieces in, closed my eyes to things I could not look at head-on, controlling the itinerary of my visits to Pittsburgh. The catalog of emotion from your last year disappeared when you died in early...
Read MoreTalone’s Yard
The slight pear tree held my five-year-old curious-girl frame. Fall fell year-long. Ladybugs tempted and purified. Startled by a praying mantis, I dropped to my knees. A doorway in the hedge led me home. Years later, I finally learned to inhale. Half-smoked cigarettes dotted spots under the pines, where I also left my innocence. Baited by bases. Kissed by the sun. Sustained by drugstore candy and...
Read MoreLowell’s Briefcase
On the seat beside him, in the back of the taxicab where his heart finally stopped, was the briefcase he never lost. Unlike lovers, his great troubled mind, waking in the blue of shame, regret, a locked razor in his hand, this birthday present survived the man himself. More poems were inside, living fragments, lines, verses in a day book mixed with cigarettes, a pair of glasses. Red dust, rocks pushed up by an earthquake, an iron church bell, lines, sinkers, bloodstained hooks, the fisherman’s net was still there to cast on the widest water. His broken body, purple face, were taken away on...
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