Poetry

It was just after the flood— days, or at most a week. The caretaker’s hut was locked, the windows meshed with wire to keep people, not mosquitoes, out. Poachers’ tracks—the diamondback imprint of tires in mud— stretched under the REFUGE sign to a wooden bridge, splintered by somebody’s pickup or backhoe last March. The bridge…

In mirrors all I see Is my own reflection My table is not a horse Onions are something I eat There is no forest In my cupped palm The sun does not set Past the ridge of my fingers Doors only lead me into The next room When I shut my eyes Blackness surrounds me…

I took the last dusty piece of china out of the barrel. It was your gravy boat, with a hard, brown drop of gravy still on the porcelain lip. I grieved for you then as I never had before.

Driving through Cambridge, leaving work, in a hurry, snow slurring my windshield, I see an old balloon-fin Pontiac, orange, with a chrome outline that drags me back to Miss Quinn’s 1st grade. From the classroom, the WPA-orange brick schoolhouse & housing project stood eyeball to eyeball. The Irish spinsters, with their orange hair, led foreign-smelling…

You will find the laboratory far simpler these days; uncluttered. The cauldron is gone, the endless bubbling, the stench, the maze of pipes, the shelves of exotic ingredients that, however combined, could not transmute baseness into gold. That is all done with. Sold or given away to whoever would have it. The thin blue flame…

I woke before dawn, still in my body. Water ran down every window, and rushed from the eaves. Beneath the empty feeder a skunk was prowling for suet or seed. The lamps flickered and then came on again. Smoke from the chimney could not rise. It came down into the yard, and brooded there on…

     I The water looked as if it were hanging, waiting under the Congress Street bridge. It was alive with jellyfish, surfacing and settling, their flinch turned flourish joyous—a slow jumping up and down. Moored in the Fort Point Channel, the ship of the Boston Tea Party Museum sat like a big, family dog while children…

Sacrificed, nailed into space once filled with dull, exhausted clothes, no wonder the wood moans like a stricken beast in a dark corner of the room. It is a yearning for foliage, fantasy, the arabesque of branch, Rococo legs that want to sink, to dig deep and become roots while every drawer whispers of the…

And once, for no special reason, I rode in the back of the pickup, leaning against the cab. Everything familiar was receding fast—the mountain, the motel, Huldah Currier’s house, and the two stately maples . . . Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale, and cars from New Jersey and Ohio were parked along the…