1 New Poem

Dishes

I used to wash plates

at the restaurant

my high school crush’s

grandparents owned, just

off the main street

in a little town with a

waterfront boardwalk

and a high school

on either side.

I’d scrape the leftovers into

a big plastic trash bin,

line cups, glasses, bowls

up against each other,

let the steam come

up over me, and wait.

Watching waiters bustle,

through narrow kitchen bends,

watching rain fall through back alley gutters,

watching summers come to an end.

I used to wash cutlery

in the sink of an apartment

that tilted to one side,

so that water would run

at odd angles, staining the

chipped countertops, pooling

underneath my roommate’s ashtray,

ruining his Zip papers.

Watching days trace into mist,

watching the in-out procession of friends,

watching absurd relationships take flight from couches,

watching dreams come into being.

I wash the glasses while

looking through a window

that turns to the sunny side

of the street, ringed by

houseplant leaves and the

Simpsons ornament my

wife bought two Christmases ago.

I listen for the sound of

pattering dog paws, as

I soak my hands in sudwater,

splendor of the suburb sunset

falling on the kitchen mat

at my feet.

Watching children play on concrete,

watching for a day’s relief in eyes,

watching the time wind rush by us

watching my heart's love wound.

1 New Poem

Song for Those Gone

I’ve heard it said
some things lost are never to be found,
but all things must return:

new forms and shades,
new shapes and names.

In dreams, you flutter on air,
butterfly wings too soon silenced,
taken under tow of time and weight,
too beautiful to be born.

We imagined you
speaking in schoolyard codes,
pitter-patter of nervous foot on floor,
tasting the first berries of summer.

But, maybe, you’ll come
as a rainbow
a sunbeam
a songbird
a shading tree.

Something that holds only joys
for you held nothing dark of
the world, nothing to spoil
from becoming all you could.

But you were all you could be:

Ours,
loved,
all seconds we shared.

1 New Poem

 Blankets (Stardust)

When you were born,
shivering,
you already held,
everyone you could have
given to the world,

the same as your mother,
and hers before;
all hoops joined in chain,

I see when I watch
the women with exhausted,
purple eyes, falling asleep
on their husbands’ shoulders,

under the digital readouts on
healthy eating in the first trimester,
billing costs for reserve scans.

The same as when
I hold you,
glacial,
I hold all the ghosts
of troubled teenage nights,

that wash away,
against light of
next thousand lifetimes,
we hold together.

1 New Poem

 Moon Cycles

Often, in silent times, I think
of trees and death, and how
they are the same:

Circular, replenished, endless,
taking, growing in kind,

Set between plastic places
that echo art that tastes
of bitter ash, bootleg cigarettes,

Back to the spring from which
all things flow.

I think, “why the Garden,
why plants, rocks, sunlight, rain,
why things so small hold joys?”

They are circles,
reminders of home.

1 New Poem

Embers

I was a great collaborator with

wartime cigarettes, an artist

with the conical scream-sighs

of life under bombardment.

I trust you more under

a broken street lamp, under

a shattered sky space,

where time stills

Than I ever did at dinner

tables pushed together on

sidewalks where some grand

conspiracy was hatched beneath

Breath you took in so

easily, not as now with

cracked plaster, mulched brick,

petroleum haze.

1 New Poem

A Note for Fathers

You dwell in memory:
blazing, soot-smoke, refined flame,
shifting, yet stone-hard,
with weights unbound.

There are scarce words
I would have written,
amongst polish concrete monuments,
amongst pine-willow shade,

had I the blood that now courses,
breath that now fills,
webs of infinite electric complexity
that pour themselves onto paper,

now.

Then I was bereft of all,

shivering for the slight,
tender touch of idle hands,
offering frozen comfort,
knowing some other truth.

In the chisel marks,
you persist
doing now no damage,
knowing now no strife,

knowing not how
grass, water, time,
can move boulders –

do not dull wounds.

1 New Poem

 A Long-Ago Castle

There was a vanished treaty
between us, an unfinished thing
in pieces of air,
in words of departure.

A promise across waters,
in amber remembered,
that I held bright, praying
for broken bells to ring.

Your signature, after I took
the hill, bloody and wracked,
dripped from lips with
wounded tone, but I

took it sincere, in a lampshade
way beneath the din of
the Turkish restaurant ,
beneath the pale light of
London black cabs.

Mine, as I stare now into
infinite regress of couch fabric
patterns,  brutalist math
of spreadsheets, time punch cards,

Was holding something back
some patterned longing
with no words to name:

This would only be memories,
written on the parchment of
windbreaks and stream lines.