Social Worker
You drive slowly in this rectangular
village, as one drives
in a graveyard.
Day fading, the plastic
grasses, whorled pinwheel
colors congeal
you wonder
where your client might live.
Suddenly a mother
springs from her trailer,
grasping her wandering
son.
It is late afternoon, and dark-
the liminal space
in which night turns
predacious. Pairs
of eyes thrill
in the forest below.
She watches you,
unyielding,
gaze
cutting
through
dusk.
When Spring Came Early
There are days
you do not measure
in seasons.
Hesitant
crocuses,
salt on trees;
unfurling green
along grey branches.
Desire begins,
inexorably as seeds
of pomegranate. Heat, sky
blurred hours
fields you run through
only to fall.
How soon,
you will think,
(standing
among your lover’s
dead), frost
makes
her mocking
reprise.
Press two coins
on your black eyelids
along that dark
and cold river
and sing only
for months
of
grain.
Still Life With Barn
Spring barn
four clock faces, unmoving
weathervane seesaws
—little golden arrow
against blue, like a Roman fresco—
one wall
illuminated
by my dying
afternoon.
Power lines hum their carcinogens.
Edward Hopper would
have painted it,
made love
to that brightness,
dark barn door open,
a lover’s mouth.
Would he also have known
the selfishly perceived unrightness
of unstill images—
cars, their wave sounds,
unexpected chill, the body losing,
by these laws, its radiances?
We hate their jumbled shapes,
these lines.
