her
more than a pool
of smudges and parts.
Wet clay in the corner
begins to harden
and blended watercolors
matte the predrawn
run of the ribs,
the swaddled shoulders
grained in autumn
tones like the disrobed
grasses in drains
that suffer cold-scald
and wind-jag.
The wrists busy now
lashing and hooking
hair to the scalp,
skin-cap to the face,
drifting shallow wrinkles
at the eye-pinch,
southerly to the ear,
leveled around the neck
like the soft-piled lines,
ruddy-pale-white,
on the brassy cheek
of the dusk-christened cliffs.
WEEKEND HOME
Not like any of the solemn ones on the cape
sitting empty week after week on those
ice-bitten January streets one can never find
in summer magazines and I am tempted, as with
so many things, to say a house can grow
a conscience when no one is around to slam its
wooden tongues and I wonder if it’ll miss
the romantic declarations of our long nights
spent sobbing and roaring, promising the end
of the end of love, and how I so wanted to see
the face it made when we slowly pulled out
of the driveway for the last time I never
shared out of meekness until now; was it a Garbo
pleading for adoration or a wrinkled Rimbaud
for melancholy, because with much effort
we had done what we do best and put away
another season of anger in the books, made healthy
our tab with another debt we could never repay.
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
