Poem 48: Still Life With Tennis Trophy

Sometimes, the burnish against the wood paneling
suggests a rustic cabin, when sitting on the ground,
helping put on boots, looking up. There is the bookshelf,
a cookbook for poor poets. Turkey feathers
in a glass vase, my grandmother's candelabra.
Once, we pulled a table by the stove and ate
potatoes by candlelight. The mantle clock, stopped
at 11:10, with a newspaper clipping taped beside.
I won the trophy in doubles, defeating my dad.
The pedestal is shiny and green. The mantle
is painted brick red, the glove rests
on the ash can, black like we saw in Columbus
in an art museum without labels, in a corridor
bookstore, in a glass stein restaurant.
Sometimes the freesia dries and droops,
Sometimes we force the forsythia.
Perhaps we should add a jar of sparkling
Cider, a fire in the stove. We'll burn old
essays, we'll consider the crushed brick
they top dress tennis courts with.
I think it's biere de garde, with the woman
on the front, liberty always has bared breasts.
A court in Versailles, which David painted:
the men all salute, while light pours in from above.
In Boston, where America and France
muralled together there's a gold dome, and
bronze ducks. March days there, too.
Wool socks hang on the gate. The ballet
trophy is in first position, my daughter
was so proud, she wanted ours together.
Some days it's hard to get her boots on,
some days it's hard to get out the door.

Poem 47: Kinkadean

We are always in dusk
On streets pleasantly cloaked
In a half dark, and a light
buzzing from the windows.
It is not fearful, nor lonely.
Loneliness is what I would expect.
The sun lingering an hour later
in the afternoon. Those canvasses
in that store in St. Augustine,
they were all too obvious for us,
inauthentic. I, too, glow
indistinctly. To the coming night
I present a yellow warmth,
all goodness and homily.

Poem 46: Two Haiku

Though there was a line

We stepped into the bulb room

Hit by the scent: spring

The pond still frozen

Despite the balmy March sun

It held as they kissed

Poem 45: River Rats

A pizza house in Athol

By the window

On an April night

A beer

Some mozzarella sticks

A number for our boat

Good luck, they say

In the next booth

In this town

The prospect

Of a rough paddle

Makes you a citizen

Poem 44: March

In the darkened house,

done with grading, I pause

To look out of the window

At the dark husk of winter

Still haunting about our doors.

Mounds of snow, fallen

And shoveled a month ago

Have done little but crusted

And dulled. The snow fort

Now seems like a penitentiary.

There will be no thaw. Morning

Will be just as hard. March,

You are cruel.

Poem 43: It is the leaves that are yellow, and old

Two paths, I said, diverged

In a wood. A yellow wood,

You’re right. And they are

Roads, but that seems confusing.

In the wood, you walk on paths

Leaves crunch under your feet

If there were cars – if there are

Cars, they take you back to where

You’re escaping from.  But to return

To this intersection, this cross, yes

You look back. I’m on the one less.

The one with less. Well, just being

In the woods, right? What you see

Are the old roads, sometimes with

Stone walls, and there used to be

No woods at all. Someone walked here.

Lots of people, maybe. And they

Are gone. Standing here, come to

Think of it, I do hear cars. How

Can I not? And they pass, and I

Stand here, and I marvel at the noise

That carries through the woods

Such that you can hear it on one path

Or the other.

Poem 42: O Forsythia

O, forsythia, all through my need for you
that is to say March, that is to say decades
All the gray days in my gray house, the gray
days of my dry youth. At the hardware store,
they said I couldn't kill you. They said,
You'll have to fight this one back.
And here you are, a smack of yellow
across my face. Can I confess, I've wanted
to bury my face in your petticoats,
I've wanted to prowl the streets
muttering about rivers, about melting.
I've always loved the river, even when
it was low and you could see the ribs
of rock. That brick gatehouse, diverting
water for the canal. O forsythia,
it's Spring and they're coming to take
away my bloom. How I find myself
staring at the fervid buds of the Magnolia,
even my pink rhododendron. Crocus hips,
tulips, all that reaches out of the earth
to bloom. Forsythia, when they take it
will you be there? Forsythia, will you tell me
you'll still burn yellow for my sake?