Poem 14: Thoughts While Walking Around the Future School of Pharmacy, WNEC

1. How the steel superstructure is like
   an Alexander Calder sculpture.
   
2. Maybe it's this low light.
   
3. That American flag on top of the idle crane,
   fluttering so high, like a toy.
   
4. The steel beams, spray painted with assembly
   instructions: gold in light, black in shadow.
   
5. A man in a Hummer, speeding out into traffic.
   The driver wears camouflage.
   
6. A sketch on a sign: the building, so optimistic.
   
7. The steel: America, its (once) broad shoulders.
   
8. White office trailers, parked in a row
   in the corner of the fence.
   
9. Maybe I was wrong about my dad.
   
10. In vertical letters on the cage arm
    of the crane: THINK SAFETY
    
11. I pause at the fence and watch two men, under
    the steel spires, next to a wood table
    with drawings laid out.
    
12. They have hard hats on, sweatshirts,
    and hammers in the loops of their pants.
    
13. They are the only people on site.
    
14. What are they talking about?
    

Poem 13: Grandpa

It's obvious, isn't it,
to note how early it gets so dark
nowadays? I've been thinking about St. Louis.
We stood in the sun, our daughter
lolling in the grass, and I thought
about a park in St. Charles.
Grandpa, much younger, with a hat on.
Swings. How our daughter loves to swing.
Wasn't it Frost who said, Earth's the right place
for love? And a photograph:
Grandpa ready to ship off in the Navy,
next to a swing set, whisky bottle upended
over his mouth. Those old photographs.
A world so different. Grandpa:
I miss your scratchy face.

Poem 12: We Always Talk About St. Louis

You were talking about your car
it smokes, you said, but only occasionally

And only when it drinks, I replied
quite happy with myself for the misdirection.

It was an unseasonably warm day
we took a walk through the unfinished

housing development up the hill from your house:
Three McMansions dropped onto denuded lots.

They had hoped to build eleven when they started
before the downturn. One is still vacant, for sale.

Kids on four-wheelers roared by; my daughter
toddled around happily in her railroad hat.

She seemed to love stepping on and off the curb;
she ran to the empty trailers parked by the road.

Our wives, up ahead, engrossed in conversation.
We talked about St. Louis, we talked about beer,

we talked about icy rain and bad roads, bad drivers.
We always talk about St. Louis. You said you saw

Jim Brown play at Sportsman's Park -- the old, old Busch.
It surprises me when you say you're about to retire.

Here I am, home three days a week, chasing around
a toddler. Reading papers on the sly, writing poems.

Twenty-five, thirty years apart, but it doesn't feel
that way, that different. We both made our way

here for poetry, to this flinty town way up river,
out east from where we're from. And we stayed.

Poem 11: Fingerpainting

Blue.
Clowds on
the lake at last light
scratched red
with a fork, scraped
and smeared
over, red dreams swimming
through, against, purple
we wake from water into storms
we rise up green
handprints underneath
we kick and squirm
little flutters of yellow
little clouds in our sky
tines, fingers, nails
blue.

Poem 10: Couplets

In the darkness, I know what to write
the words wander, like planets, through the night

In the silence, I know what to say
it hums, like trucks on a distant highway

Across the water, through the crowds
over the noise, despite the fear and doubt

There is a notion, a separate sight
In the darkness, I know what to write

Poem 9: A Bitter Sonnet

Defiantly, my students comprehend
universal health care: we just cannot
afford it. In their essays, taxes rocket,
doctors quit their jobs, and we wend
our way down that dreaded slippery slope
to Socialism. Their hero, Jeff Jacoby
says our society would be less free.
And Nick Kristof? How shall we say it? Nope.
His sob stories don't sell -- he leaves out
all the numbers. But this is not to say
they want that poor girl to die, they're not cruel.
Hard working plain folks shouldn't be without
health care. But they don't want to have to pay
for freeloaders. Isn't that the golden rule?

Poem 8: Something to Teach Us

This is a poem with a naked girl.
She's my daughter, 21 months old,
standing on the vanity counter
of the ladies' room in church.
She's looking at her reflection
in the counter-to-ceiling mirror.
Mommy was changing her diaper,
putting on pajamas, but she stood up.
Now her hands rest on her round belly
on either side of her navel,
still sticking out like a little knot.
I'm standing behind her, watching
as she clearly sees herself, sees
her body. How do I say it?
It's a naked girl looking at herself
in the mirror. I want to see her
as she sees herself, at that moment,
a wondrous thing, a bird, a latch
that opens, water that spills out
from a spigot, how it catches the light
how it's warm to the touch, and,
with soap, makes your hands clean.