Tuesday Poem: Previously published in Footwork in 1987

Barn Fire

vomits flames and smoke into yellow day,

about a mile ahead down the Thruway,

leaves us breathless in the car,

searching through the trees

for a glimpse of the fire’s

hot mouth, as we draw near,

barn skeleton like a

child's drawing in black crayon

vibrating over a floor of solid flame,

walls gone; everything going to charcoal.

I think about hay –

how sweet it is, fresh from the fields,

how it chafes and generates

heat when it’s shut away,

sparks and goes asmolder in the dark.

I was sixteen when my father begged

Uncle Dick to put him in the hospital.

He was terrified, he told me,

that he’d kill himself.

Our mother and he were separated

a couple of years already,

but she drove the two hours it took

to get us up there, soon after he called.

The plastic bracelet hung on his wrist

as he asked me for a light, as we

sat in Rockland State Hospital’s ]
dayroom, a poisonous fog around us, as he

chain-smoked Pall Malls, letting them 
burn down to little cylinders of ash.

He coughed as he talked, a fire 
slowly rising in my chest as he ranted.

Did we know they took the mattresses

off the beds, forced him to pace

back and forth down the hall,

like a moving target?

His hands were shaking, his long 
tobacco fingers pinching the cigarettes 
flat, as his voice cut the air, my throat 
going so raw, I could barely swallow.

Did we know they were starving him?

His supper last night was a 
slice of bologna, and a handful of dry 
spaghetti, with a packet of ketchup.

He cried so hard at the thought of it, 
he couldn’t even choke it down.

We’d bought him another carton of Pall Malls, 
a Life Magazine, a Look. The blister around 
my heart was getting bigger; I could hardly breathe.

It’s only temporary, Tom, try to 
hold on, my mother said. Then she 
told us to say goodbye to him, it was 
time to get going. He asked us for hugs.

I remember my hands beating the air 
around his shoulders, like homeless swallows.

The closest I could come to any comfort.

Tuesday Poem: from The Grove In The Eye Of Light

Scrub Pine

He seemed to need so little,

his spare frame bent

on learning to play guitar,

my middle brother,

weathered and

sturdy as a pilot boat

lost in the salt mist of music.

Years I watched him,

cheered for him, trying to green

and grow while a hurricane

raged between our parents,

until he shut himself away

from all of us, taking the knob

off the door to his room,

replying to our entreaties

with bouts of silence.

Now his solos take me back

to when he was eight months old,

sitting in the high chair I carried out

to the back of the garden,

and kicking his little square feet,

as I fed him peaches,

cool and sweet,

the sky as blue

and cloudless as his eyes.