Holding Light
My father took me to the shed
Sunday afternoons to fix piecemeal
wood into frames for selling.
Trash
As a teen in the great north woods, I spent long quiet hours in my hometown library, where I found solace from troubles at home, troubles in school, and troubles in the world. I sat in the big leather chairs and read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I had no clear understanding of the book, such a foreign, worldly voice, so unlike the talk of local lumberjacks and factory workers.
Misting
is the one thing involving flowers
I’m reasonably good at. Daybreak
finds me in the yard with my hose,
attentive as a bee.
Considering Metal Man (as a Template for World Peace)
He sits in Union Station so that you don’t have to,
Covered in metallic paint, not moving, like applied
Pascal taken one step publicly further.
Now That You’re Gone
at least until the end of the first semester,
who’s going to yank the sheet from the mattress,
click the nubs of new bicuspids,
if you’re not around to dream?
Man with Birds and Bread
On the edges of the afternoon
we lie on the beach, gray waves
the only language,
the gun-gray curlings of salt-tongue.