THESE DAYS

Here at the local Starbucks you
sit in the college outskirts, wind
ruffling your papers, sky so deep
you're falling, all these ideas
chick-scratched in notebooks, ink-stained
napkins nested in your journal,
blue smoke from Russian dilettantes,
Polish lovers mooning over
the linguistic patterns of starlings
and coffee, Indian physicists
sipping caramel macchiatos,
arguing flights of particle theory
poetics and super colliders,
while scruff-feathered sparrows
beg for cake crumbs. The birds perch
beside a child standing on a
plastic chair, teetering, barely
able to speak, the wind blowing
hair in her lips, her Turkish mother
smoking, studying the season,
the girl picks up her mother's
flip phone and studies its black
odalesque screen as if it's some
talisman to another world:
she licks the screen with her tiny
pink tongue, giggles, puts it to
her ear, "Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!"
while her mother smokes in silence.
The phone clatters to the cement.
Birds scatter like the host.
The wind from their wings
pushes hair off her eyes.
Swaying in the tiger lilies
behind her, she's your wild aesthete,
your soul, your restlessness,
waiting to be loved.

MIDLIFE

Migod it's noisy this morning!
I can hear the ahhh of tires
on the tri-state, the dragonfly drone
of a Cessna scrawling overhead,
the high-pitched yips of chipmunks,
the scrabble of squirrel claws on ash bark,
morning trollops of cardinals
in the dirt and creeping charley,
the flagging moan of the diesel
drifting from the valley with the
steel clatter bouncing off houses.
How can one be so alone out here
among the overgrown lilacs,
the low-slung electric wires, the
leaning and chink-walled garages,
rusted ladders sprawling across
plastic lawn chairs, a misbegotten
apple tree stinking of ferment,
a tree so ugly even the wasps
shun its lurid juices, baskets
of bedraggled impatiens hanging
like twin iridescent squatters
condemned to life without parole,
monstrous swordleaf daisies
horning in on the neighbor's sundeck,
the slack clothesline, backyard jalopies,
rustbuckets, broken down wheelbarrows
invaded by trumpet vine, abandoned
charcoal grills upended, baring
their bent and skinny insect legs
to the sky, and, at long last,
as if to announce the end, a
single blue jay proclaims some
terrible household tragedy, as if
all tragedy were the same,
the bird bath's been tipped over,
the basset hounds are whelping in
the basement or someone finally
found the philosopher's wife dead
as a doornail dead on her lawn
in her robe and slippers, a
metaphysical mystery, she'd
been haunting the sidewalk for weeks
shouting "The darkness! The darkness!" ,
and it's not what she deserved but
it's certainly a sign of the times,
these are all auguries, predilections,
this world is an Old Richard's
almanac warning you it'll be
a hard winter, and this is what
you get for coming out here
in the first place, determined to
think of nothing in particular.

EMBARRASS RIVER

To live here you must absolve

     yourself of all pretense, 

all worldly signs of wealth

     or possession -- not that it's

hard, there's never been anything 

     here, really, save the damned 

river -- there's nothing to mortgage

     except what you do

to each each other, women and men,

     seeking redemption in

each other's wrinkled flesh,

     but it's the eyes that shame,

you can't escape, the deeper fear,

     like a furtive skunk behind 

the eyes, the mind embarrassed.

     There's no privacy here, no 

escape, the sensual and the 

     practical, the poverty of 

a river dock, you fish for

     trout and suckers, trap crayfish

in the claybanks, even pull

     wild rice from the oxbows.

Even on our death beds

     our friends and family

are too embarrassed 

     by the end to cry, to smile,

to hold our lifeless hands, 

     the skin sinking to bone,

oh the personal ownership of it!, 

     the selfishness!, the shame 

of causing such a fuss!

     And when we pass you wonder

What was all of this for?

     This economy of feeling,

this abstention from 

     all things carnal, all the

empty hours, that damned

     dying river?  What value 

remains from all this 

     fierce holding on?