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Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (32)

Nightfall

The two of us in a white boat,
casting contentedly and without hope
as dusk falls in the quiet bay.

In the mirror stillness
of the end of day, or beginning of night,
we hear the sound of water

moving, a faint trickling, somewhere near us.
Somewhere near us water is coming
into, or going out of, this great river.

Now it is dark. We have stopped
fishing and are just sitting, listening
to the sound, a little louder now,

of a great bathtub emptying, or filling, slowly.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (31)

Spring at Owl's Head

Spring all we called it, as if no merely local
miracle was referred to. Water stoplessly

seeping upward from the invisible lake, some
unseen aqueous chasm hidden deep in earth.

Track back past the moss-lined tin trough someone never
seen maintains: the source conceals itself in bog. And

mouth is just cool rivulets in sand, a coolness
spreading out from shore and blending with the warmer

river. How could water ooze through stratified death,
the slime and soil of lives compacted down to rock,

only to emerge so clean and sweet, sun-sparkled
trickling down off the trough end into your cupped palms?

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (30)

To Understand

Under the hours in cross black tunnels coil
Heart-worms, thought-rats, moles, minotaurs of night;
Above them bends this green, your grass of days,
Which in a swoop you scythe–to disprove light?

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (29)

Absentia

You planted the bomb that made a fuse
of her otherwise ribboned, striving days;
and loosed strange worms to churn into sand
all her carefully cultivated land;
and blackened her memory with chars and twists
I have longed to revisit on you with fists–
except you absconded long ago
taking all that she knew, leaving all that she knows.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (28)

Spring Cleaning

The letter arrives like a gush of warm air: How's old
Soandso and suchandsuch must have been fun–
Well, Soandso died and suchandsuch got sold.
Five years will do that–hell, five seconds can!

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (27)

Never the Twain

The burghers look insane to me,
With their kids and pups, with their SUVs;
I'm sure I look the same to them–
Parked on a side street, chewing a pen.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (26)

Tickets

So few ride the art train all the way there.
Most don't board at all, some try a few stops:
drama club at school, lip-syncing the Inkspots,
a divorce poem or a watercolour phase;
by noon you've got the club car to yourself as
you clickety-clack through the cooling green air,
just you and the brakeman whistling Scarborough Fair.

Prayers, Portraits, Post-Its (25)

On Hearing of Her Marriage

“She's married a wealthy man,”
they tell me, looking for my reaction,
but where's the news in combustion?
Fire, until it's out, finds oxygen.