A skinny woman sits over coffee
and hardly moves. I warm it just
to check on her. Last night
a boy appeared — ragged and jumpy.
He’d scratched up just enough
for two eggs. I threw on a link
and some potatoes. Old Sam
would shit if he knew,
but screw him and screw you
if you tell him. The kid looked
scared, like I might charge him
for the special. I winked
and he started breathing again.
When I came back, the food was gone
and so was he, but his change
was stacked quarters to dimes in a sad
little tower. Tomorrow night
you’ll come in after a fight
with your guy. I won’t say
a word about your hair, the state
of your make-up, or your coat —
too thin for the night air.
I’ll pour you a cup and heat up
a slice of the dutch apple.
After the End
What will happen after the film’s end
or the body’s? We fix our gaze
out windows, beyond railings into a fog,
impenetrable, settling over a field.
Not our element, that watery mix.
Your note arrives by pixel and post
with your voice, its grief and sweet
sustain, just as I’m off to join
a throng — a march against flames
that leap above their leaping. Out past
the edge of sight, they burn as sure
as lies fall from a huckster’s lip,
as sure as earth gives its wet breath
to the cold air and a blues beat
sends slave songs into the earphones
of children massing on a campus mall
after the flood, the blight, the plague,
and the great attenuation, massing — sure
as your father breathing in your breath,
sure as someone breathes and pulses
out there beyond my life’s wink.
Piazza
Barefoot, or sometimes in one shoe —
entranced — he’ll put out trash
or get mail from the box and toss it
onto the pile of envelopes on a counter where
she’d have opened bills and paid them,
where she’d answer appeals with small checks
or read articles in the magazines. A son
or grandson stops by to sort and mow
or shovel or rake, and he seems OK
if you stop him at the curb and talk
about weather or who used to live
in which house, seems quite well,
in fact, like he could still do the lawn
if he noticed or remembered, but without
leaving he’s stepped into the piazza of some
renaissance oil and moves among figures
in the endless vanishing background
Camera Obscura
Agitating trays, I once watched
prints rise into their own shape,
black tones growing rich,
lustrous. Now I sit in a basement
staring at a figure light has left
upside down on the back walls
of my eyes. Streets I knew
house by house, elm by ash,
a park where mailboats dock
between runs to freighters — what
was our town and what might be,
brought together like silver nitrate
and light. One image waits
undeveloped — after a fight,
a child in a window staring out
at the wreckage until cops kill
their lights and split and glass
clears and her breath’s damp heat
dissipates in a cavernous night.
Years Ago
Seated among strangers at a wedding,
and, laughing with him, I almost
I met a Polish bassoonist, brought
envied that defiance and love of word,
to Detroit by exile, marriage and a gig
so rare here, where we spend hours like
with a local symphony. Smart, well-read,
water, and, not unwatched, are watched
he was glad to talk about Milosz,
seldom and don’t trouble ourselves much
how a mimeo volume sold — in weeks —
if now and then a few are picked off
a hundred thousand copies that passed
sent away kept under wraps or made
hand to hand — mimeo, paper, and book
to breathe while underwater and never
all banned, all secret — and the poems!
worried much about reading poems
Boring formal lyrics read one page
to make us free, since we could more
at a time, scandalous satire read
or less come and go as we pleased.
across the gutter. How he laughed,
More from The Byword
Comments
*Comments will be moderated