Selected Poems from
Music for Orphans
June Day
Then handsome Jimmy drove me home
from day camp in the Mustang;
radio loud, he did some driving
for my mother, divorced,
on roads nigh and narrow
with high hedges of the rich.
Maybe I said they’d made us run
a mile, and he, Hot day for it
or That’ll put some muscle
or we just listened till we reached
as I’d half-sing to anyone,
1632 Old Gulph Road, Villanova, P-A
and parked beside a strange small truck.
I touched the IH on its grille,
then our chrome pony, engine-hot,
and ran to the kitchen
and Sabina, ironing, said
Look at the dirt and sweat on you,
and I, I ran a mile today,
and she, The devil you did,
and I would have stayed for Oreos
and root beer, her Pull
my leg again I’ll smack you,
but I must tell my mother
of the mile, found her in the hall
and said, Guess — she crossed
my words in voice both staged
and thin, Owen, I want you
to meet Austin. This is Austin.
Austin what? Austin why?
But I got it, uncle manners,
put a hand out. Owie,
hey, he said aslant and toying
with what from uncles meant
dear boy, dear child, What
were you going to tell your Ma?
and I said, Oh we ran a mile today,
and he said, That’s not much,
and I looked down, I pushed back,
It was hot. He shrugged. At last
my mother spoke, Well good for you,
half-heartedly — how could this be —
Sapphire Ring
Meditating on a special cushion,
my ex-wife’s Christmas gift,
I see again the sapphire ring
my mother gave us, her first
engagement ring, then ours,
a star sapphire from Sri Lanka;
how it matched my wife’s eyes.
How we lost it, years ago.
She took it off to braid her hair,
waist-length that pregnant winter.
It must have fallen in the toilet.
The cat must have batted it in.
It must have bumped and floated
through sewers into Boston Harbor.
Let it go, says an inner voice.
Yeah, you try, says mine.
Instead, I jump up, water things:
a money tree from my ex-wife,
a spider plant from Mary D.,
our child’s fourth-grade teacher.
When she was nine, her family
left Italy on the Andrea Doria
to settle in New York. A Swedish liner
rammed them in fog off Nantucket.
Mary escaped in one lifeboat, her parents
in another. Their reunion made the news.
Some years later, on a sister ship,
my family sailed home from an Italian year.
Safe in my father’s arms I crowed
ecco l’America to the Statue of Liberty,
my mother beside us, wearing that ring,
her big face like the statue’s.
I bet the ring is no more
than a block from the toilet,
lodged in roots and sludge.
From a manhole, I shall rise,
heroic in Tyvek and a ventilator mask,
the ring in my gloved hand.
That Same Strange Blue
Shuffling to coach
on a flight to see my father,
probably for the last time,
I lock eyes briefly
with a boy in business class.
His dark blue irises send me
thirty years back, an island,
diving before breakfast
into sea that same strange blue,
near-violet. To him I want to say,
my game’s not up!
I’ll swim that way again —
as if his eyes have power
to undo time, fifty turning,
like an Escher staircase, up
or down to forty, thirty, twenty,
eighteen! — to my mother saying,
as I walk by in wet trunks,
“Oh look at that long sexy back!
Just like your father.”
The Violet Errand
The day demands that I love
only it. While noon’s glare
banters with flanks of horses,
blue mountains blush in the distance
that gives them their name.
A naked tree becomes a sketch
of pathways in the brain,
pink nodes close to bursting
the constraint of winter.
For all its confidence,
the day is empty.
Let it pass unrequited.
Climbing slowly, I speak to the hillside
as if you walked with me,
and find violets, unassuming violets,
in the shadow of a stone wall.
These are the flowers you asked for,
bound to grow dark before they reach you.
Ancient of Days
Her carapace
tented
on eight legs
caressing
the scrutiny —
unbearable
multi-jointed
carapace ferries
cones topside, mouths,
stomachs feeding upward
and they lead each other
unresting, unhasting,
her carapace.
Don’t say carapace.
Dogs bark, saws rip.
Don’t say dance, a million,
what is a human in the annals,
the glaciations, meteors,
volcanic winters. No.
There is kinship. No.
The harbor water near the fishing boats,
not oyster-clean. There is the water weaver,
humble strategist, the load of eggs, the males clambering,
the quickening spurt,
the courtship tracing runic hooks in morning sand, the lip
of her garb the brush
of the skirts
of the Duchess, finished.