THE SHORE PARTY
The grill sits with its mouth open
like a child begging for more.
I’ve lost count of the franks we’ve eaten
and the beer we’ve downed. My wife floats
in the water with her friends, their white skin
striped red. When a boat speeds by,
a false tide bobs them like buoys,
and for a while the old conversations
about love lost/found, the fickle
needs of lovers, are replaced with laughter.
Listening to them I’m given a second life
in which I forget the friends I no longer have,
those lost to time, the ones given up to distance.
Not wanting to lose what I now have,
I plot a wooden frame
around our square of lake,
its legs sunk deep in the sandy bottom,
the far end open to the water,
east and west a window
(maybe curtains, too); a dock
stretches from the lip of the bank
into the boathouse where hunger will knock,
where winter will sleep.
When I come to my senses, the sad
box where I would have kept them
like singing mermaids gives way
to the aimless mind of the wind
teasing the junipers, skimming
the brown surface of the green water,
nudging the black tubes of the tight circle
of sisters who are not sisters
whose hearts I cannot save. I slip out
of my shirt and shoes. As I wade in
I raise my hand in a sort of wave
as the cold water teaches me humility,
as I deepen the melody of their laughter.
CIRCUS PONY
What joy to say our short winter days
are behind us now. Gone the old life we filled
with empty laughter, the times we’d pack
the backseat with every hitchhiking clown
we happened upon — our record was eight
— until the year our fathers died. Gone
the red-nosed hours, our grotesque smiles
drawn large and wide, when we rehearsed
our cold routines of “Hey, are you okay?” and “Fine.
I’ll be fine.” Remember the long seconds — three
slow ones in all — before your face
that took an hour to apply turned grave
or the look you wore, sadder than any clown’s
in the rain, that was my cue to knit my brow
and continue fumbling with the three-sizes-too-small
hammer you handed me so I could once more fix
the swaybacked rocking horse we purchased
to ward off an unspoken future in which we
are continents apart, surrounded by our hungry
new families as we slice and dismantle
the same braised roast and lament how
we could have let hope stray, how the story
of our lives might have been different
if it had contained, however lame, something
we could have ridden into the sunset on.
PATIENT ZERO
Love is a worried, old heart
disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff
blues are made of, real blues
that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk
like the “Okra Blues” or “Payday Blues,”
though I think House would agree
two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues,
if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog
bitten in two by the neighbor’s dog, all of which
makes me wonder about the source of our disease
and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam
and Eve left the garden. Some have argued
that the first case of infection
could be traced to a carp or a stork, or maybe
even the hare, because God made them first, after all,
but the love lives of birds and fish,
even rough rabbit love, are more perfect
in their simplicity than we can ever hope to know
such do they dispense with the rituals
of courtship in short order
so much so we don’t really want to admit
the beasts and fowl and all manner of slithery thing
can truly love like us
so we label the heat of their hearts
and loins “affection” or “instinct”
or some trick of the lower brain and I think
if we are to be good scientists we must investigate
the moment when the sons of God made themselves
known to the daughters of men
before we turn up a singer strumming
a lute shaped like the goose egg
the singer’s mouth makes
every time she bends the long, mournful note
about how her angel traded his feathers
so he could walk in the skin of God’s prize creation
and in so doing became the first man she ever knew
who wasn’t full of shit
and yet was, because even though angels never eat,
her holy birdman always hemmed and hawed
when she asked point-blank
why it always took him so long to fetch a gallon
of moonlight or why he kept his wings
folded and why is it he wouldn’t crow
her name to the dawn unless the night
before she had said, Enough is enough, we’re done,
and her face had flooded and his
chest had burned cold
until