Category: Poems & poem-like things

It is the hour after noon. At the sandwich and ice cream shop I sit in the car before coming inside to join you, waiting for the call with the test results from the doctor’s. Colder today, but behind the window glass I count at least three old men— silvered hair, baseball caps— ordering double scoops: butter pecan and chocolate, strawberry and vanilla, butter pecan and strawberry. They walk out of there slowly, licking those ice cream cones like nothing else matters; we should all be so lucky. Women and children out early from school sit on counter stools eating pulled pork sandwiches, fries, onion rings; guzzling limeades or shakes. The place is packed, but only the cash register rings the air. Gulls bluster around the entrance, unfazed by traffic. Amid the trees edging the parking lot, some fates are being decided too: a catbird chases the rival of its mate in silence. And I– I cast a tiny prayer into the foliage, then watch to see what might descend.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

These are registers on the staff
of days: grains of dust that gather

like vellum in summer, the high and lazy
whirring of ceiling fans. Drifts of yellow

petals falling from the tulip trees, pitch
and warble of birds. Gather and gather,

lisp the ants and worker bees; pluck
and scour. The season lilts like a song

working the route to its coda. Lyric by lyric
the mouth learns the intricate passages:

where the rests are, and the furrows.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Walking to the waterfront in hopes
we might watch the fireworks show tonight,

one of us kicked aside the sun-bleached
carcass of a bracken leaf. In the pagoda

garden, fireflies lit the ochre undersides
of leaves on the Japanese maple. Heat

hung like a bower of creosote flowers
in bloom, presaging rain. And sure enough

thunder rippled in the sky across the water,
rain came down in sheets. The only

smoldering on the horizon, a barb
of ragged light every now and then,

outlining the spires of ships. We sat
at an upstairs table in the crowded

restaurant where people had rushed
for shelter. Someone pushed open

a sliding door on the veranda and the cooled
air came rushing in, musty as the planks

on the wooden pier. But somewhere in the currents,
a vein of remembered scent; and I said, Gardenia.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

They say not the dove first but the raven,
sent out to fly back and forth across the earth
all in shadow, until the waters had dried up
and the penitent returned with their paired
beasts and the seeds of future gardens
pressed in the crevices of their palms.

But memory, long and bright in the sun,
shrivels in darkness or solitude. In the stories,
the bird is only a herald: it brings back
proof that something in the void sustains,
with wings that change color too: not always

sooty or dark, but touched with flame
like a breast or the fruit of a heart
offered up to the soul. And oh it wants
so much to be dissolved in the hour of its
most brooding need— what it seeks in the cup
not charity but some form of kindness, mercy.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

*and after Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ “The Prophet Fed by a Raven”

In front of a cloud
of blossoming mountain laurel,
a deer: the flash of her tan coat
passing quicker than a kiss farewell—

Always, you travel ahead. And yet
you’ve cast your shadow everywhere:
even here in the river shallows,
refracted in the volatile colors of fish
swimming from the brutal heat of day.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.