Tuesday Poem: originally published by The Wild in 2009

 

A Crow and Two Beer Bottles

are all you see as you skim

the arc of the highway entrance ramp.

Bottles crusty with mud

and embedded in pools of roadside grit.

Bird pecking in slow motion

at some dead mysterious stuff

in the grass on the verge.

Picture the empties flying

like headless corpses out of a pick-up.

Picture wall-to-wall crows

and acres of bones stripped clean.

Soldiers pouring beer down

their throats in between shifts

so they won’t wake up

when they scream in the night.

Crows caught mid-flight

by a swarm of bullets,

because we can’t accept

their roosting among us as kinship.

Beer bottles layering calluses over the heart.

Birds stripping flesh in long

streamers that look like ticker tape.

Bodies, crusty with mud, wearing

crows where their eyes used to be

Crows like big fat masks

you put on for Mardi Gras.

Chip your tooth on a

bottle if you’re not careful.

Play your little ivories like dice;

get the crows to curl round as little dots

And you’ve got yourself a craps game.

This is what it’s come down to:

your cat obsessed every night,

with attacking the little

half moon of streetlight,

that shines through the window

onto the opposite wall,

and you, in your post-election funk,

feeling apocalyptic enough

to leap at a pair of images

over and over until

your mind goes numb.

 

Tuesday Poem: originally published by The Syracuse Record in 2003

 

Milkweed Lyric

Here

in this moon

scape snow-lit

night, our bed is

a pod, perched at the

end of a dry grizzled

stalk, heaved by the

wind this way and that.

Here, on the Milky Way’s

shoulder, we curl, snug little

seeds, taking fugitive rest

in a feathery but ephemeral

nest,  tucked in so well

we’re unable to see

what might be out

there waiting, or

where we’ll

be planted

next.

Tuesday Poem: originally published by Lake Effect Magazine in 1987

Hermit In Winter

To live without words,

to be muffled thump of axe,

hiss of snowshoe floating over hillsides.

At night the forest air is black ice, so you have to 

be a furnace, fueling, always fueling, warming each 

sub-zero gasp with your mouth and leathery lungs.

To wear wolf near your face,

go deep as an old trout,

growl out bear songs at dusk.

When you let a breath go, it haloes around you, 

gray as the gloom overhead, and when work is done 

there's burrowing into the hut's blood warmth, 

its door flaps: valves thudding shut.

To squat among the drifts, wailing with the wind,

to call your own cadence of days,

choose shadow over light.

At night, winter never 

stops beating,

and you are its heart.