KITES

A poem for Christopher Jones, a victim of COVID-19

There are kites

whose tails are too short

 

who, pinned up against the

felt blue sky, begin to

twist and turn and fly

in ways we do not anticipate,

 

and we, all children again,

hold tightly to the spool and string, and

imagine that we can will the wind

and hold our kite still,

 

some forever faraway patch

sewn into the firmament,

 

and the littlest of us will cry

when the thread breaks and our kite

escapes, some wood-winged bird,

into the clouds above,

 

and though we wish now

its tail would have been longer,

we would not trade

another foot of ribbon

for the way it danced

so high above our heads,

for the tug and pull

we felt as we held it

for the way our hearts

jumped as it dropped and rose again

in the summer breeze

 

and later in life, when we are old

and even the littlest one does not cry so easily,

we will, together, stand kite-less in a field,

 

and once more we will feel the sun upon our faces,

the wind across the high bones of our cheeks,

the grass beneath our still bare feet,

 

we will all look up and smile.

DINNER AT ANNIE'S

At Annie’s, a little gay

bistro just off Dupont Circle,

I am sitting across

from my college roommate’s

older brother’s Portuguese

husband whose name I can

never remember.  I call him

Raul, which I do not think

offends him, at least not

tonight as his lithe olive

hand stirs the straw of

a Hendricks and soda.

His husband, a tall man

with soft Gaelic features,

smiles easily and holds

his Cosmopolitan like a Martini.

He is a thicker, more elegant

version of my roommate, and

while asking a question across

the table, he moves his hand

to Raul’s knee.

The other two guests

at our make-shift dinner party

come in like a 1920s

vaudeville act.

The first, a lawyer,

is unpolished and gruff

for this delicate, music box

of a restaurant. But when

he speaks, his prose

rattles like timpani.

He orders off the menu,

hoping the wait staff will

bring him a slightly incorrect

version of his meal, which,

of course, they do.

He does not, however, admonish

them; instead, he begrudgingly

eats enough to be satisfied

but not so much that

he cannot wipe the corners

of his mouth with a brow

furrow of contempt.

The other one, a dandy, is, I think,

the closest I will ever come

to meeting Oscar Wilde. He is

one liners and innuendo.

He sips his Martini like a

Cosmopolitan and fills conversation

with a Southern lilt and

timing forged only in the mouths

of antebellum matriarchs

of Georgia and Northeastern

gays who have slid geographically

and linguistically as far south

as their politics will allow.

He takes small bites of

his dinner and a young waiter

until both are just bones

on a plate.

And I am a guest and an

anthropologist, eating the last

of my steak salad while scratching

Sanskrit fieldnotes on the

cocktail napkins that cover this

place like Autumn leaves.

And I doubt this little poem

shows how scared I am—how

my heart is racing and my hands

tremble like the cherry blossoms

which hang, with their weekend

grips, on the last days

of their season.

Because while stultified, while

barely hanging on to the

last days of the only season

I have ever known,

I am still, of course,

a scientist, and we only look at life

with glass eyes.  We only look at love

with hearts, already dead.

CHERRY BLOSSOMS

In D.C., the cherry blossoms

float like small balloons

tied at the wrist to

the wooden hands of dying

trees.  Here, where the

white skin of halls and

monuments throws the sun

about like children, the

cherry blossoms still pink

and white after an early

April snow, clutter the

radial roads of this

anachronistic city.

The tourists, wide-hipped

septuagenarians from Tallahassee

and St. Paul, gather around

the trees with their

goose-necked cameras.

They don’t know that the

trees, like you, can’t be

trusted, and that while

the balloons they hold will

eventually deflate and fall

into district gutters, the

wooden hands are perennially open

reaching up to this east coast sun

pulling

                pulling

                                pulling

down a sky they’ll say

they never promised.

Walking

There is a small pond
near my house, and in
the evenings when the
wind is high and the
sky is alit with the blinking
traffic of a nearby airport,
I go walking.

There are seldom people
at my pond, not in the evenings
when the young and the old
are both in varying degrees of
sleep. The night hours are
reserved for the middle-aged
who without child or parent
to make demands can
stretch their legs and
beat the beaten path.

I share my pond only
with the barking dogs who
eye me suspiciously through
iron gates and the ducks that
land and take-off like the
nearby planes and their Morse-
code murmurings.

I did not start walking to be
alone, but somehow, each night,
I am. The sweeping sound of my
sweatpant legs a light percussion
in an orchestral performance whose
audience is one bald bearded man--

Not particularly sad, not
particularly glad.

Just walking.

FISHING IN NORTH CAROLINA

In September of 2016

I caught a spotted brown

trout in the Davidson River

just south of Ashville.

I was using a dry fly,

they later told me. We

had been fishing near

a hatchery. The water

was clear but slow.

The river, it seemed,

was crawling. Among

the stones and logs,

we could see several

fish darting in and out

of pockets of light.

I flicked the thin rod

to my left and right,

setting the end just

up river of a nice 20”

sleeper. She moved to

the right as the hook

drifted by. We played

the same game three, four,

five times, and she, like as though

choreographed, would move aside.

While watching the monster

of this Pigsah forest stream,

my hook and tippet drifted

down river to a  small covey

of spotted brown trout.

As I saw the striker dip

beneath the surface of the

water, I pulled up on the

top of the pole. The hook

set, and the fish swam

quickly upstream. I held

the slack of the line and

pulled her under control.

Her track became smaller

as she swam to my left

and right. My friend

slapped me on the back

as he dipped a net just

beneath the snagged fish.

I reached in to take the

fish with my bare hand.

I lifted it, and it fell back

into the net.  I took a picture.

I tried to work the hook

out of its lip. The line broke.

With help, I took the hook

out before setting the fish

back in the river. The

fish, a delicate creature, I

was later told, did not move.

I saw it turning its soft

white belly to the light.

Another friend, a river guide

from Montana started waving

the fish in the water from

his left to his right. The

movement, he said, would

get oxygen to the fish’s

gills, revive her so that

she could swim again,

and she did. And then

she stopped. He once again

moved her in the water

until she started moving

on her own. She swam

upriver, and I lost her among

the light and the fallen leaves.

My friends assured me that

she would be fine, and while

small, to pull a fish from

a North Carolina stream

with a fly pole was a

worthy victory. Later, my

friend, the river guide,

sent me a trophy picture.

The fish looked small

in my hulking hands, the

unflattering pullover I wore

distorted my chest and

stomach so that I looked more

like a monster than a man.

My beard and my hat

framed a disbelief in my

eyes, and an apology pulled

my shoulders to the muddy

river bed. I prayed for the

fish like a prayed for the

dove I shot when I was 12.

I prayed in hope that my

friends were right, that

the small 8 inch trout

was swimming upstream,

recovering, telling stories of

her thin escape. Or swimming

but unaware of why she

feels something that she has

never felt, something that

we would call pain, something for which

she does not have language.

And how many times are

we too caught and thrown

back? How many times do

bare hands slide against

our skin? How many times

are we held up for pictures,

gasping in the autumn air?

How many times do they

try to take the hook out, leaving

it in as we fall back into

the net, ripping our lips

as they pry off what we

once thought was food.

How many times are we

set back into the river,

gently moved left and right,

so that we gain a little

momentum.? How often

do we not have the language

to say to others what happened,

what’s still happening?

How can we avoid the

hook when we have no

word for it? How can we

explain the pain when we

have no memory?

How can we leave the

river when there is no

word for river, no article

to suggest it is a specific one,

no verb that means “to leave?”

And how will she know,

as she swims among the stones and

dappled riverbed, that

I wrote this for her, that

I too fear being caught, that

I too, know fear is not the word?

A Dream Defeated

A friend of a friend

won the Stegner fellowship.

In a couple of months, he will amble

toward Stanford and begin a two-year

commitment to write poetry.

The world does not care. Only the

MFAs with pedigree are eligible 

and only the ones with influence

are chosen.

It is a Publisher’s Clearinghouse

and they bought their way into the raffle.

The fellowship itself is a course in masonry

where they teach promising poets to wall

out what does not sound like they are writing.

And so they gather and mortar and I

am left here, typing on a blog for an 

audience of one.

I can’t help but think that between

the geometry tests I am grading 

and the Ludlum book I have yet

to finish, there was a moment

I too could have held a spade.

Great regrets are not taking advantage of opportunity.

Our greatest regrets are the moments we thought the opportunity was ever ours.

Prepare your heart

They told me to prepare

my heart; so, I bought

a store brand marinade

and 7 bell peppers.

I made an incision just beneath

the ribcage, reached into

my summer garden of a chest

and plucked it like an heirloom tomato.

I set it on the drain board

and covered it with cumin.

I sliced it into 14, quarter inch slices.

I put them in a bowl,

added my father’s Polish herbs

and soaked them in the marinade.

My heart is now in the fridge

beside a jug of milk

a 7 brightly colored peppers.

They told me to prepare my heart

Another, I suppose, will cook it.