Death Watch

clothed in white, she stands

slim & pale beside me

glints bright & flickering

walks with me, speaks

liltingly, words I can’t hear

sits pen in hand, upright

yet tilting, eyes on the world

outside her window — algaed

pond, seed-filled feeders

she doesn’t acknowledge

or deny me, I’m furniture

in her once furnished room

a stream of white letters

titles a silent sonata

a hand-painted clock

reports the hour, owl

at dusk, thrush at dawn

the book stack on the round

table may or may not be

set for me, I want them all

she nods, gestures, please

this is how she feeds me

why I wait & watch still

a fixture in her empty space

a fourteen-line poem on what to do in blinding rain

1. walk out of Costco with a full cart

2. no raincoat

3. drive home from Burlington

4. do a mental-walk through the house

5. to find the open window

6. be happy your car is getting washed

7. wish you’d mulched all the gardens

8. wonder where squirrels shelter

9. what frogs are doing

10. think about leaves falling

11. before they have a chance to turn

12. wonder when you’ll get a break

13. to unload the car

14. pretend you’re a plant getting sloshed

Hi There

I'm a freshman [sic] [not] — a first-year second-

term cliffie — sleeping in the hall outside my

dorm room because my roommate is a prep-

school whiner, I raise the black plastic

handset of my landline phone & dial at random

some anyone answers, “hi, there” I say

“how’s it going?” amazing how many strangers

stay on the line, me imagining them

them imagining me, late night, mid week

they may be deep in family & friends

or, as I am, on their own, I rarely tell the truth

& expect they don’t either, instead we two

bodiless, ageless, pretend we know what

it is we’re riffing on, what’s the game again?

 

a fourteen-line poem on molasses

1. cold butter

2. grandma’s molasses

3. on white toast

4. hard yellow chunks

5. black puddles

6. not mixing

7. a bittersweet taste

8. sound of grandma chewing

9. the crunch inside my mouth

10. nothing like grape jelly

11. like something older

12. harsher, like

13. her wheelchair, like

14. all she doesn’t say

a fourteen-line poem on hollyhock

1. hollyhock is a word I can’t remember

2. also my favorite flower

3. of more than 400,000 species

4. most I’ve never seen

5. wrong names seek approval

6. honeysuckle — no, delphinium — no

7. holocene, hendecagon, hackathon, halogen

8. six weeks of one bloom after another

9. sooner & sooner

10. hollyhock turns up

11. flowers followed by fruit

12. each disc holds 15-20 papery replicants

13. wanting to scatter

14. raceme, bract, schizocarp

a fourteen-line poem on family

1. my parents never laugh

2. or smile

3. except phony smiles for non-family

4. painted-on smiles like dolls

5. I take that back

6. my mother smiles at her siblings, & lies about

7. dr. puppetmaster, he

8. gives orders, waits to be obeyed

9. though I see the signs

10. I don’t know he drugs her for sex

11. I deflect, subvert, defy

12. the minefield I veer through

13. scorched, scarred

14. I earn my dead face

a fourteen-line poem on obsolescence

1. old

2. retired

3. offstage

4. unscheduled

5. unimportant

6. unneeded

7. unpredictable

8. unreliable

9. out of touch

10. missing

11. forgotten

12. free to regain

13. my child

14. self

 

Buttons

the hike persists as burrs

hitched to my pants legs, spiked

green buttons — I don’t own

clothes with buttons, mute

gaping mouths — I strip the hard

pips to the floor of my friend’s

car to weather winter’s heater

funk — dehydrate, ferment

incubate — come spring, come

thistle threading her car’s interior

come fungi sporing, invisible

mites, robin song, oak leaves

unfurling, scrawny wide-

mouth yawning bear