Saratoga Passage, August 2014 54
The Color of the Fluid in My Father’s Catheter Reminds Me of Snowball Flavors 58
Summer Grass Aches and Whispers 67
Ways of Looking at 13 Dead Bald Eagles 68
…that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
–Gary Snyder
Dream, July 5, 2006
Coyote has crept into the house
up from the ravine where he
has followed deer from the county
into the city along Herring Run.
I go to rescue the cat
in the living room, fend off
the intruder by kicking at it,
kicking my wife in her calf
as I thrash about asleep,
waking myself up with a laugh
as Jen punches me in the shoulder,
rolls over, and falls back to sleep.
At night, these predators
creep into our life like doubt,
wild, uninvited, but something
we live with, fence out, fend off
when it gets too close, and listen
to at dusk as it calls from far off,
lonely, seeking insecurity, its mate.
We shudder at its untamability,
its reminder to huddle close
against the darkness
just beyond our embrace.
Kevin
Has danced into class every day this year.
Some days, he’s James Brown throwing off his cape;
others, he’s pop-locking old-school style,
moon-walking, doing the Harlem shake, or leanin’ wit it.
His eyes always smile, especially when goofing
to cope with the challenge of reading. Today,
something’s wrong. I pull him into the hall and ask,
why the angry look, the sulking.
Two cousins shot on their stoop last night,
one dead, he and his brother having just
gotten up to leave, having just turned the corner
to walk the two blocks home.
This world of darkness, punctuated
by muzzle flashes and numbness,
has followed him on two different buses,
across district lines, into the good school
where his mother lied to get him away from it.
He had turned the corner,
but the world he left behind now sits
at the third desk back on the right,
its shadow eclipsing his eyes.
To A Poet of the Three Gorges
It is evening: cold wind, late November,
east side of Baltimore’s harbor. In the display
window of an upscale home furnishings
boutique, an old wooden ox cart wheel,
circa 19th century China, mounted
on an iron stand: prized salvage
from the flooded towns and valleys where
the Yangtze carved deep into millennia,
cascading through culture and time.
I think of Du Fu, turning his ear
to the gibbons’ howls reverberating
deep in the three gorges, his skiff
moored along the shore, verses coming
like lanterns at night, borne by the dark currents,
lifeblood of heritage, surging past his bow.
Downstream, a new power flows from the river,
its megawatt hum echoing off concrete ramparts.
The old voices, now whispers, drown in waters
rising to light cities of millions where, once,
men in simple wooden boats and carts
delivered the news one verse at a time.
Gulf War Veteran
When he returned
from the desert,
a former high school
classmate brought home
an extra pair of ears,
each taken from
confirmed kills.
He talked of stars’
brilliance through
night vision lenses,
of breathing acrid smoke
from the well fires
and coughing up
globs of blood and oil,
of scorpions seeking
drops of moisture
in soldiers’ mouths
and stinging their tongues
as they slept.
Part of me died
that evening
when I saw him.
He never returned
from that war.
Under the Leonids
Two