knows she was an uncommon arroyo who understood
that blue on the quintile is a withering thing;
knows Billie lived in an upended Vermont and was
not unlike a nova or a seed in a scalawag’s belly …
My father took me to the shed
Sunday afternoons to fix piecemeal
wood into frames for selling.
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.
is the one thing involving flowers
I’m reasonably good at. Daybreak
finds me in the yard with my hose,
attentive as a bee.
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.
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?