Poetry

Walking Notes

I The noon dazes us, a brilliant back-beater. II Like hands slapping the water, ducks settle. III Shakedown time: fall trees fork over to the winds. IV Cornfields craze the wild crows, raucous on the fence. V This, this, this: like a stick against fence pickets.

Some Comfort

Two straight days of sun and the idiot magnolia opens Boston, to cleanse it, pull the bullet of winter. I feel better. The bodies in the river thaw to neon fish, and clouds, sculling. There’s no telling when it will snow again. Blossoms are words in the long-winded streets: landed absences, long-distance calls for relief….

Isopet

A burly country bumpkin, Bald as an autumn pumpkin, Sat – in his cups – at home. Some kind of fly, a-winging, Time and again kept stinging His unprotected dome. Each time the pest would land, The peasant smashed his hand Smartly against his head. Just as the bug would bite him, He tried in…

Baxter’s Wharf, Hyannis

The blue breeze spins In near-still swirls Away from land. A gull lifts off The dull brown pier, Then works its wings And scales itself In sidelong glide Downwind, down wind Alone, black-tipped Wings its way up Through a soft scale Like a mild dream Balanced on sleep. Then, blood-beak poised On molecules Of sea…

Involving a Risk

Nights flex. You occur to me like morning’s sketchy moon: a surprising intimate. I lapse into you delirious as a drive into rain. Something you say is your hand, opening, inside me. You have to sleep alone to dream. . . Who can remember, counting backwards, the logic of snow. Leaves shake their fists, the…

Crash Diet

You starve yourself, your body as essential as the crust off a bread. Not me – I’m the whole loaf. I rise and fall. I tease the clock. A proud machetti tears me open, warm, white, steaming. Stuffed with tuna, devilled egg, curled like an intestine, I am greedy, Every pink pimento is a fleck…

My Malaria

Don’t worry about my tongue being a biscuit of dust. Don’t think about my pillow which is filled with quinine. I don’t. My malaria is not contagious, nor is it hereditary. Why do I walk bent over like this? Because when they operated to remove my malaria, and found nothing, they became bitter and sewed…