Category: Poetry

Water dripped from the neighbor’s spigot as the planet held tight to its pocket of time. You told me the joke and the next day I saw tiger lilies everywhere. I wasn’t sure if I had just begun to notice them or if there had been some massive overnight planting.

True, it’s been years since I was last in love,  since someone considered winking at me.  And years since I’ve seen anyone buried or born. 

The sun shines deep his bawdy light into shrewd strangers

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.