POETRY

Pile


*

     The boy stayed silent and his mother confused about where to go. Behind
them, the exposed
drywall and damp floor of unfinished office space. The boy was the patient, or perhaps they
were going together. After directing them upstairs to the therapist's office, I returned to my
desk. Vaguely picturing games they might play to reveal their feelings I continued to delete
duplicate addresses from an interminable mailing list. My bulbs were hardening in the 22
degree sunlight and my pulse raced for them. What good was I?








*

There's rue for you, and here's some for me.
We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, 
you must wear your rue with a difference.









*

		Copper roof. 			Seagull.
Driving down 		Grimes		he turns to 		look
		into the white plastic top of a child's carseat 		open mouth, smile.	Wet
grass	 			the cattle's rumpled flanks steaming.	Scrape
of the rotary phone's dial.				Snow shin
deep.		Gray barn.	Groom: 	black patent	Bride:
		seed pearl and sequins.
			


*

The day you died, I went out to the pile.
It wasn't "burning efficiently" so
I was able to measure the seasons in
lettuce heart and dried-out peony stalk. I pitch-forked my way
through tea bags, thorns, cut grass.
Down to what was certainly not my past:
one meadow vole and then another
scuttled from under the heap to hide
behind a fence post. Seedbead-eyed
proofs of my failure.







				*

Day moon dives
through sky over razor-wire. Pale Stingray,
you do not belong here.







				*

The cat bites the end of the pen
and the deforming weight of snow on the branches
of the lilac lumps up, a dazzling cancer.
At the base of the drainpipe,
starlings peck through a bag of last week's garbage.
Bonanza amid burial. This
much-too-late-in-March fall of much-too-leaden...They pinch
and pick hole after hole until some slimy bit-of-something becomes
accessible. O, my dark and oily brothers, your beaks
bore between my shoulder blades, into my ears and crown
with a heat as white as those luminaries when the sky is no longer
just a poor reflection of these drifts we dance at the feet of. 
We are named for them, we who eat refuse. Who will pick
the spring trees clean.



In memory of Harry Kamien