I Have A Past
I was young
and the dead lived in photographs.
The insects spoke in tongues.
I can’t remember
whose hand toppled my toy soldiers,
set up little girls in their place.
But a rabbit.
A book.
They endure.
The weird thing about living
is that if I suddenly remember something
then I stop growing old for a moment.
I ask of my mind
and it comes back with names and places.
It doesn’t always get them right.
But it makes them worthy.
New York Theater
All the world’s a…
you know how it goes.
The streets are overrun with plays.
Wherever there’s people,
the buildings, the sidewalks,
are a set.
And everyone’s an actor
even if the work is merely
“two guys coming from
different directions
pass each other without incident.”
Every car, every bus,
has a role to play.
Cops make it a cop show.
A CPA turns it into
a three-act drama on accountancy.
I show up
without having learned my lines.
Luckily, I can ad lib
and nobody is any the wiser.
“Which way’s uptown?”
I ask a young lady
at the beginning of my
less-than-famous opus,
“Which way’s uptown?”
She points.
Hers is a dull
and dialog-free piece
on the surface
but is imbued
with deep meaning
For it gets me some place.
What else can you ask of a play?
Burying A Husband
At the end, she softens a little.
Could be the muted music, thick drapes.
A brute he was, a belligerent drunkard,
but her rage is no use to her now.
And mourning is such a cold snap,
icicles that form like tears,
an expression frozen dour
against her will
as she hugs the ones
with nothing but kind words for the asshole.
What choice does she have anyhow?
The death is shared among many.
Even her daughter’s pretense is sincere.
Only seventeen, and, despite the evidence,
she even desires her own husband –
a man who’s not even in his grave.
Learning To Fish
The fall I learned to fish, my dad
woke me before sunrise, muttered
something like “so what’s a little rain.”
As we walked the short trail,\
to trout heaven,
I gripped both rod and his hand,
those rough palms from years of railway work.
And then, with the stream still in shadow,
the moon ebbing, the banks cool and damp,
he loosened himself from my hold,
fitted his hook with a wiggly night crawler,
beckoned me to do the same.
I was afraid of the squirmy creature.
But, with eyes half-closed, teeth clenched,
I somehow baited my hook
without spearing my finger.
Then he flicked his line smooth
far across the stream’s surface.
Mine merely staggered in
Slowly the lights came on.
The night breeze waned.
My line cut gently into the slow current.
My father’s roamed so far,
it almost grazed the opposite bank.
I imagined that, below the surface,
fish amused themselves at my paltry lure,
before swimming off toward dad’s wiggly seducer.
He caught five. I had not one bite.
On the way home,
he wrapped an arm around my shoulder.
“Maybe next time,” he said.
And not sarcastically
like when the fish spoke to my worm.
In The Long Months Of Drought
The birds need water
but the clouds are not forthcoming.
All they can do is peck
at the bottom of dried-up ponds,
scour out the places where water used to be.
The sound you hear
is the feigned slurp of creatures,
of plants, sucking up nothing,
and a wind from the west,
even dryer than the land,
that blows those birds around
so that they look like they’re actually flying.
That’s why there are so many crows,
so many starlings, so many sparrows, above you.
That’s not soaring.
It’s just letting go.
Like Moira with her cancer.
Her bones, her flesh, are winged.
They take to the air
when people come by.
