to browse,
time to confess,
because once I’m born again
I will strip every bit of stiffness
from your branches,
caper with boastful wings,
disable a dreamer’s voice box.
Only then, when my love’s green head
lies calm and still, will I deliver him back,
tenderly, to the cement block steps
of the porch he will finish someday.
Alleys
Behind our back yard, an alley: Daily beat
of our neighborhood’s resident derelict.
He pursues cans and bottles,
tells my husband to fuck off, sings.
Stray cats visit us here too.
They pounce on day lily reeds,
hunt cicadas in our tangle of sweet peas.
This is not the hardest thing we’ve dealt with
since the move from New York.
Mental illness has padded after us for years,
sometimes purring, always scratching,
most predictably, esurient as hell.
I’ve grown hungry too.
Tired of being exposed, trapped,
neutered, but not returned—
forbidden from keeping jungly garden,
junk cars, busted bikes out of sight.
I want to look my neighbors in the eye.
Sit up front in church. Join something;
the choir, ASPCA. Or better yet,
walk with my shadow man when night falls.
Reason with him. Legitimize him.
Hold his calloused hand as he screams at the world.
Indiana Breakers
For Suzie
It’s a good day to paint. She has a clear view of the courthouse,
bulwark of this Midwestern town with its bell and postcard austerity.
Winter aconite, tiny yellow flowers which generally pop by Lent
have finally scaled snow. Honeybees are all over them.
Library goers, antique-shop prowlers, two police officers stop.
They are the heart of this place—heroes who care about art,
church, flowers. But they don’t comprehend her canvas.
The abandoned storefront she captures was once a five-and-dime.
Vacant for decades, the floor has caved and despite its
pressed tin ceiling, cherry wainscoting, no one’s going to save it.
Starlings flit in and out of clefts. Two lie dead in the rubble.
Birds dart into the belfry of the courthouse too, but it’s the
sunken joists of the store which seem to swell when morning
light bends, approximating waves off the coast of Kittery.
She won’t complete the work. By May, bricks and tile will fall,
town will vote and building will be condemned and razed.
The artist may or may not return to Maine, and the courthouse,
as always, will stand fettered with flags, heritage roses on the Fourth.
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