Anchor
Published in Measure, Volume III, Issue 2, 2008
I’ve sloughed off skin so many times,
cast rattlers in the sand behind.
In Phoenix and Los Angeles
I burst into brand new selves,
cleaned out the ashtrays and moved on.
The Captain understands all this,
the four careers but no gold watch,
as he unwraps a new needle,
latex gloves arranging tubes
like some old deckhand tying line.
A last smoke halo sailing off,
the iron buzzing in his hand,
he etches lines on my triceps:
a kedge that moors me to a shore
less fading than my identity.
I tell him this and he just smiles
as if he’s blessing death away
with something certain to survive
the blood vessels and graying hair,
the dead reckoning that remains.
Living Will
While filling in his living will
he discovered the will to live again.
For unacceptable qualities of life
he checked the boxes on the form
for chronic coma, feeding tubes,
persistent vegetative state.
For a week he lived his testament:
For a week he lived his testament:
didn’t sleepwalk through the frozen foods
or ignore the glorious fluorescence.
Quickened by the canteen’s quiche,
he lost track of what a colleague said,
smiled about a project gone awry.
He notched his deepest ever breaths,
exhaled slowly like a yogi,
was dazzled by his prism paperweight.
Watershed
And though it’s understandable to cling
turn gently to the one that lies ahead.
Even if the edges of an umbra spread
and you worry over flocks scattering
you’ll see both rivers from that watershed.
Although you will have gathered words unsaid
and unsung love sighing and blustering
look gently to the one that lies ahead.
Though you know well the frame is limited
you’ll wish another spring were issuing.
Accept both rivers from that watershed.
Of course you’re bound to be unsure, misled
by science and religion wondering.
Turn gently to the one that lies ahead.
Perhaps there are no images to dread,
no forests of darkness and reckoning.
You’ll see both rivers from that watershed.
Go gently to the one that lies ahead.
Ice Cycling
The puddles of a sudden thaw
were refreezing fast to sheets.
Centered above the seat and frame,
I didn’t tip the scale an ounce
but pedaled at an even speed,
did not accelerate or brake.
It struck me how this symmetry
was only more neutrality,
another fence to perch upon.
I caught the sketch in black and white:
slush pixels spattering off spokes,
a rider denying gravity.
Then I was sprawling on the street,
resolved by a cracked clavicle.
Published in Red Wheelbarrow, 2008
Still Life
On any given bough
in any given spring
buds sprout to sprigs
inexorable;
then stalks stretch vertical
towards open space,
perspective, light.
Prune in spring,
new lengths
are there the next.
Leave them be
and they become
twig and branchlet
living to quiver
against slate skies.
2
The sunset seems the same,
as do these skeletons of beech.
Children walk from school in pairs;
traffic buzzes back from work.
3
She’ll be mist, rise in rain,
become a single crystal droplet
dangling from a brown branch
waiting to fall,
come to muddy soil,
abide, a weed of stiff strength
with berries feeding birds,
disperse, arrive
the egg of that desert fish
that waits for years
beneath parched creek bottoms
to be born in a flash flood,
carried to a sudden lake,
evaporated into mist.
Yes sweetheart, it’s fall,
when the leaves turn
to golds and reds
then brown on the ground.
And winter waits,
perhaps with snow,
for Christmas
and your birthday.
Spring will surprise
with warmer days,
leaves of green
brightening the trees.
Finally summer comes
and you can swim,
run naked in the yard.
Then another fall will come.
After airports and autostrada
I’d driven slowly back in time
through quilted hills of vines and groves
and into potter’s fields of grain
lining the road to village roots,
the cradle of my maternal line.
I’m led out through the family plot
into the Montefortino fields,
the homeland of grandmother’s tales.
We taste tomatoes from the vine
and cousin points to a Celtic shrine
hiding in oak and asphodel.
In this spring of mother’s people,
where Italian names on family trees
have tilled these hills for centuries,
he shows where archaeologists
also sifted through the sediment.
Their harvest wasn’t sentiment
but a Neolithic necropolis
of fifty Celtic skeletons,
the former settlers of these hills.
They wore the golden crown of Gaul
and the helmet now buried again,
under layers of museum glass.
military headgear and is now called the Montefortino Helmet.
He keeps them in the concrete tank
they used to use for pig urine.
They’ve now weathered two winters there,
at times beneath ceilings of ice.
He says an inch of water is enough
and then dismisses them till spring.
Today his keyed up kids report:
both fish glimpsed through the cracking ice.
My own little girl’s brow crinkles.
She thinks about her fish at home
glassed off from weather, sky and fear.
We created a world for them,
bestowed upon them love and light.
She vowed responsibility.
When white-spot struck their paradise,
fantails flailing in the pump’s stream,
we delivered them from their plague.
She says her fish are happier than theirs –
where water and refracted light
cast fathomless patterns in her room.
Through widening windows in the ice
the farm fish bask in the stark sun
that hers will never know.
Published in Equinox, June 2007
