Category: Poetry

I woke with a wet pillow and hair tangled, I didn’t care.   It was Sunday. 

I heard an owl outside the kitchen window, winged and cloaked in velvety dark

The forestry man says the tree is over three hundred years old, a sugar Maple that has been here since before the time the white man settled.

Ally tells me her husband is adjusting, that they all are, that the diagnosis is for the right kind of cancer, if that makes sense

The spring day when after the dark subway the light was blinding and the last of the snow melted, trickling into the gutters, but still there was the scent of fresh snow. Work was over at last and there wasn’t a thought of tomorrow. There were flowers like lit candles on the corner near Old South Church and just enough money for daffodils that came dripping from the bucket, daffodils carried home to our room. where we sat without having to talk. And I became part of the sun-struck halo, the snow-washed high windows, the silvery mirror, voices rising from the street, walls saturated with ghost music, passengers peering from train windows and those arriving to vanish in the distant Back Bay streets.

Were they tall terns? Or meant to be herons? Lined along the sill of your big bay window, the small wooden birds your hard hands carved as Christmas gifts for a dozen children,

Those were the hours, infected, we were aware of her body, the fever wringing out the cloth of her, the sheets a witness. This was a skirmish in a war of attrition

Can’t find my shoes. Forget them. Torn sheet? Forget that. The soft quilt drifts, my cast-off reading glasses tilt sideways— slippery sheet, blind glasses, orphan shoes: a stage for drunken love though I’m sober.