HER TELLING

 

When she told me

after she’d uncoiled the line

     with the steel stakes at the ends

     to set straight rows of peas

     clad in her denim cover-alls

     and tall rubber boots at seventy,

after she’d tossed garden stones

     onto the long windrow

     beyond the asparagus,

after she’d showed me

     the ants climbing the peony stalks

     to the hard buds and cupped hands

     beside the kitchen propane tanks,

and even after years of stirring

     green tomato mincemeat

     on the yellow Glenwood

     and tugging carrots

     from the hot August soil

     and snapping off ears of corn

     and letting me pick clean

     the tree of seckel pears—

     the hard tangy red fruit—

     in October,

even forty years after that Christmas day

     when she smashed the third floor door,

     the children listening below,

     to find her husband inside,

     dead by his own hand,

my grandmother was stunned

by her own telling.

 

 

The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review (Winter 2010)

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SUMMER EPISCOPALIANS

       ~ notes from an introvert

 

They are more self-confident than I,

and even though I’m one of them,

 

they rattle me when I overhear their spiels

in deli about imported Swiss before

 

choosing Champagne Brie, or when

these women, white-haired, blue-blooded,

 

chat so self-assuredly in coffee and tea,

their crisp tennis dresses showing

 

their pedigree, their baskets full of organic

pears, natural chicken thighs,

 

and English breakfast tea. The men

are clean-shaven with jaws that say

 

prominent, sailing tans melding

into winter’s Merlot seas. Their

 

faces are almost names. I dodge

into canned vegetables and flee.

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 Cookbook for the Soul, St. Francis by the Sea (2013)

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CHICK MAGNETS

 

It’s the Patriots’ home opener

and I’m at a poetry reading in Maine.

The Pats are playing the Cincinnati Bengals

yet Tom Brady is here at the poetry reading!

Tom, I say, why aren’t you in Foxborough?

 

Oh, he says, I’ve always liked poetry and

I’m making seventy-two mil

so I can do what I want—

Coach Belichick isn’t too happy though.

 

The poets read about Cranberry Island,

mice in bread boxes, dragon-flies,

Morocco, eating oysters in Grand Central Station,

summer cottages, and, well, you know,

the kind of stuff poets write about:

heartbreak, and a lot of asters by the side of the road.

 

This Savory and James is good stuff, says Tom

after the reading, smoother than Bud Light.

And being here is a lot easier than throwing passes

—his right knee twitches and lifts slightly—

and getting trashed by the Bengals’ defense.

Plus, these poetry readings are real chick magnets—

you and I are the only guys here!

 

 Turtle Quarterly (2010)

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CHET  SAWING

 

Barefoot each year until the snow, his

ice-man’s rubber apron girding tattered

shirts, skull-capped Chet braces one knee

 

against the three-foot circular blade,

draws a file over each tooth, adjusts

a valve, cranks, and the ancient one-lung

 

engine backs, then catches, the fly-

wheel gaining, and the twisted black

belt begins its thwop-thwop-thwop lashing

 

the air as Chet, eyes aflame, swings

the logs on the moveable carriage

into the terrifying blade, the oak ash

 

maple we cut from the forty-acre lot and

along the dark edges of the fields. My father

shoves the logs to Chet, my brother tosses

 

the stove-lengths, some to the splitting pile,

some to me to pitch through a cellar

window. I am nine, astonished at men.

 

The thwop-thwop-thwop falls and rises,

falls and rises, the saw-rig stuttering on its

spoked wheels, the Model A to tow it still

 

attached, the earth blurring, shaking,

the stench of red oak and gasoline, and

Chet, iron-age man, calloused feet deep

 

in fresh sawdust, bending to the wood,

bending to the saw that in twelve years

will receive him when he falls.

 

 

 The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review (Winter 2012)

First Prize in the 2011 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest.

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HOODWINKER

 

No wife, no mother, so I hoodwinked my son,

a damaged kid. I wore grayish talons and

 

the penalties have grown stiff—no balms and

only wisps of grassiness sewn into dreams.

 

Woo Woo sings Joni, thin and high. Drifts

curve behind the boat-house and one cedar

 

hangs like a falling axe over the snow. I took

him up, led him on, and left him in a white

 

metal crib. But there was no thicket, no ram,

so I was the trickster. Was it my voice? Was

 

there no chapel for prayer? The seasons go

round and round and O, it weights me—

 

I led the way. May I investigate miraculous

repentances? May I forgive myself?

 

 

 Bellevue Literary Review (2014), and finalist for the  2013 Marica and Jan Vilcek Poetry Prize

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HOW WE BUILT OUR HOUSE

                                

                                 ~ for Leslie

 

We built our house of wind and salt,

of seeing and touching. Our shovels

 

bit in, our wooden-handled hammers

beat rhythms. We learned berm,

 

window spacing, roof pitch. We

chain-sawed joists to length, then

 

spiked with a kind of awe at our

dexterity. We felt the mystery of plumb,

 

and when rains blew in we smelled

the pine. The rafters became our heart

 

and we nailed high the green bough.

Now grace shines off the gray metal

 

roof and together we listen to the barred

owl’s call, watch the blossoming peach.

 

 

Pushcart Prize Winner (2017)

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PALIMPSEST

 

How immodest we are

for the deer-tick check,

 

surveying mysteries, 

displaying imperfections.

 

Such stuff, we laugh,

is for the shower

 

or the dermatologist,

but we strip,

 

offering each other

our pocks and moles,

 

scars and protrusions,

thirty years after love’s

 

first shy scouting

expeditions.

 

 

 River Styx 93 (2015)