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Compensation

The black birch was dying from the top down,

so many branches having already been removed

for safety that the goldfinches no longer came

in the fall to hang upside down and harvest seeds.

Still, the sparrows went to work on a hole in the tree,

gradually widening it to nest size, and I watched

several sets of hatchlings, all bald heads and gaping

beaks, at first, then perching for a week or two

like puffy dauphins on the fence, and then gone.

One year the chickadees were first to the hole,

defending it, making it more spacious still. Other

bird couples came and went, each doing a bit

of remodeling, as you do, upgrading to stainless

steel appliances, maybe, or marble tile. It was as if

they couldn’t help picking away at it, like your old

aunt who knits as obsessively as she once smoked,

filling whole rooms with afghans, slippers, hats.

Each tenant planed away at the walls, until one day

they punched clean through cambium laths

and drywall bark, leaving the home open to wind

now that would chill the eggs. The nest lay vacant

for years, the hole like a periscope eye in the stump,

until one summer when wasp masons began

bricking up the walls, mixing saliva into stucco,

subdividing, leasing studio apartments, a vibrant

compensatory hum for the slowing xylem and phloem.

Published in Broad Street, 2019

Take Heart

One of those days when you realize the best thing

about the day was the barista who made the espresso-

and-foam heart on top of your latte and said, this

is for you, which was enough to make you hurry out

the door before anyone could see what it had done to you.

Otherwise, the day was full of bigots and homophobes

and a royal flush of other –ists and –phobes, and a man

at the grocery who said something to the little girl

in the cart behind him in the checkout line singing

that Katy Perry song, and whatever it was he said,

it was enough to quiet her roar. What is wrong

with people? you say to your cat at the end of the day,

as you dump Grilled Liver & Chicken in Gravy Fancy

Feast into his bowl and scritch behind his ears

while you tell him about the barista and the heart

and the girl in the shopping cart, looking, I suppose,

for a little support, the lick of a rough pink tongue to say,

I don’t know about the others but this human is okay,

but who instead lifts one hind leg skyward and gets

to work, so that it comes down to the fleeting foam heart

skywritten across your coffee to stand between you

and the thousand swastikas, the Katy-haters, the night. 

(first published in The American Journal of Poetry, 2018)

Planned Obsolescence

Nature meant us to have just a few decades, time enough

for puberty and propagation and seeing the kids safely

onto a soccer team before we were eaten by a giant kangaroo,

saber-toothed cat, or fellow primate, or more slowly felled

by dengue fever or gingivitis. She could not have anticipated

sewer systems, antibiotics, sterile operating rooms, or

the many and varied uses we would put to the buried

remains of ancient life. Who could have guessed how many

of us would live long enough to die of natural causes,

to experience that closing cascade of systemic organ failure,

surrounded by loved ones and our collection of porcelain

corgis? Surely she must be appalled at the sight of our octo-

and nonagenarians dancing to Johnny Mathis, walker-to-walker

with the other residents of the Shangri-La Assisted Living

Senior Hospitality Center and Make-Your-Own froYo Bar.

Still, there goes my neighbor Norman, who made it on TV

for turning a hundred last year, and who, early in the morning

of every school day, dresses in his cargo shorts and high-vis

safety vest and walks down the street to the busiest crossing

in front of the elementary school, where he guides pods

of impatient human young across the street, telling them

to slow down, stop swearing, watch out for cars and zip up

their damn coats if they don’t want to catch their deaths.

(first published in Atticus Review, 2018)

Glaucoma

It starts small. First, maybe you fail to notice the blue
azalea bush that has been remarkable on the last corner
of your evening walk for thirteen years. And so it isn’t
there. Then it’s that stretch of new housing out 

by the airport that up and leaves the map as if a wash 
of bleach were bleeding in from the west. One day, 
when you’re not looking, one Indonesian island blinks out
and triggers a cascade through the other seventeen

thousand like a strand of Christmas tree lights going dark.
By the time you look around, continents are calving-off entire 
countries, which maybe join Atlantis in the Mariana
Trench and pick up where they left off or, more likely, turn

as barren and white as Great Barrier coral or the pods 
of belugas which, by the way, are no longer punting about 
in the Arctic, their melons having gone missing, along with 
the sea ice and, while we’re at it, the sea. What’s left,

at this point, is a solitary cistern of clear water, inexorably 
evaporating, leaving bathtub rings in the red desert rock, 
as it goes. Still, if you cup your hands around your eyes,
shutting out everything else, if you peer deeply into the dark 

water, refusing to avert your eyes, as if their lives depended
on it, or yours, you can see your grandchildren there, chasing 
a dog on a narrow islet of grass, oblivious to the truth that dawns 
on you at last, how they are all that is left of the world.

(first published in American Literary Review, 2018)

Taking Measures

 I wrap them like fine china in layers

of old newspapers and bubble wrap

and still I know that the moving man

will drop the box or hit a pothole

on that bad stretch of road heading

out of town and something will crack.

All spring I have watched song

sparrows readying their nest in the rotting

crotch of a birch tree, laying in twigs

and leaves and feathers, lacing it up

with string pulled from the canvas

deck chairs, only to have the arborist

take the tree down on a day I wasn’t there

to remove, first, the nest with its four

mottled brown-and-white eggs—

which needed to be done, he said,

to save our house from a windstorm

whose inevitable coming he foretold.

I still tiptoe past their empty rooms

at night, throw salt over my left

shoulder, batch the bad things

that pop up on my news feed into

groups of three, but leave my phone

in the other room at night, willfully

believing that bad news will wait,

that one can take one’s medicine

in the morning, that the sun will rise.

(first published in Bookends Review, 2017)

There Ought to Be a Manual

It’s like the first time someone who is not your mother sees you

naked. Because you don’t know, do you, if all your parts

are in the right place, shaped and sized appropriately, according

to convention?—because your mother would never tell you,

which means there you are, pulling down your pants over

what might well be a preposterous ass. So, to my point,

you don’t know, likewise, what to do, how to be, at these grown-up

parties, so much depending on first impressions, decisions

about where to sit, what to drink, how long and loud to laugh

at pretty much everything, as far as you can tell, whether anyone

has noticed the fear-sweat creeping up the small of your large back

and pooling in environmentally catastrophic oil spills under

each arm. Or how, when you leave the party ten minutes

after arriving and return home, you confront, equally unprepared,

the task of “putting down” your dog—will it be like it is

for the Kentucky Derby winner who breaks his million-dollar

leg after crossing the line? or like the farmer who takes his shotgun

and the children’s 4-H pig out behind the barn?—this dog

who can only look up at you, these days, as you come in the door,

who doesn’t pant anymore so much as rattle, who has seen

your ass, listened to you laugh long and loud at Julia Child

pummeling the pastry dough, who has a thousand times taken you

outside for a little sun, and who has always given it to you

straight—like yesterday, when he told you that one of you needed

to grow a pair, and since you had taken his, it fell to you,

he said, to figure out how it was meant be done, how death

for one could be brought about, how going on, for the other.

(first published in Gloom Cupboard, 2016)

You Know This One By Heart

It will start as the sort of love poem

you know by heart, with the young

couple waist-deep in the ocean, en-

twined, and then work its way around

to a day at the park, throwing

frisbees to their corgis and kids. Then,

not unexpectedly—you will have seen

it coming—the requisite scene of vitriol

and recrimination. All you will need

are a few details about who was found

in whose pickup truck doing what

with whom, and you could write

the lines yourself. Where the poem

takes a turn, however, is when we see

the man, years later, walking in a forest

as if he knows it like the back of his hand,

kneeling to see the tiny vines of blue-

eyed marys growing alongside the trail,

when all at once a great horned owl rises,

so close the man’s hoary heart nearly

breaks in his chest, beating like wings.

(first published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, 2017)

Coming Out

When I put a quarter in the table-top jukebox

for three songs by John Denver, Darrell calls me

a wuss and dares me to try a bite of the breakfast

special, calf brains and eggs. I tell him that, unlike

some people I know, I don’t need to order brains

from a diner—which I can get away with

because he long ago tired of pounding on me,

and anyway I’m paying for the food, and the cigarettes

from the machine, and for wherever we might

decide to go where there might be girls to see us

smoke. Last week when I told him I thought

I wanted to be a poet, he looked at me the way

my father did when I told him I was leaning

Democrat, or like my mother when I came out

atheist—just keep praying to lord Jesus, dear—

I could see my words zipping through Darrel’s

head like a hummingbird had come in through a tear

in the screen door and really wanted out now,

but in the end  it was enough for him to blow smoke

in my face, make me swear to god I still liked girls.

First published in Pembroke Magazine

Anglerfish Love

I followed bioluminescent

deep-sea Google Maps to find

you flashing your tawny

midriff, on which I nibbled

playfully, read you bad poetry

about two becoming one,

before latching on. Best day ever

for a dude, right? freeloading,

hanging out in my underwear

night and day in the TV room,

letting you have your way

with me from time to time—

you know I could never resist

the sweet esca of your illicium—

feed from your fridge, watch

Adam Sandler movies until

my eyes and even limbs fell off.

But, baby, you don’t come around

much anymore, only to complain

about the beer bottles, the sheen

of salt and vinegar chips on my lips.

I see the way you walk the red

coral, now, holding up your light

like a siren to every passing sailor.

(first published in Hartskill Review, 2016)

Empties

It’s like Forrest Gump—or his mama, rather—says

about what life is like, though I think she

had in mind the mystery of it, the serendipity,

the good (mocha truffle) with the bad (pecan

nougat). What has caught my eye, this morning,

as I take the faded yellow lid from my

Lifetime-Supply!-sized Whitman Sampler,

with its 25,000 little cardboard cubbyholes,

is how little it matters, now, what each

contained, whether I may have stuck my finger

into some of them to see what was coming,

how the dog ate one whole corner

and had to be made to vomit at the vet’s,

how I remember getting on a run of the good

stuff, once, a row with nothing but dark

chocolate over ganaches of peanut butter

and mocha and key lime, or that one winter

when just the thought of one more insipid

morsel made me cry. What I am noticing

this morning, more than the fact that every

remaining piece has lost its tempered shine,

the coating cracked and pale at the edges—

what I notice now are the long white rows,

the empty rows, straight and even as headstones

at Arlington, and how these days, when I choose

my sweet from the top left corner of the box,

where the remaining pieces huddle together

in the last, unshaken corner of the Etch-

a-Sketch, how I hold it in my mouth, let it melt

for as long as it takes, like the kid saving his last

piece of Halloween candy until Christmas day.

(first published in Arcturus, 2017)

Die-off

When I tell my future great-grandchild that I remember

a time when a lucky human might see a Sumatran rhinoceros

in the wild, she will look at me the same way my grandkids

look at me now when I tell them how we used to plagiarize

our school reports on the dodo bird from paper-and-ink

encyclopedias, and then she will google the rhino and tell me

she thinks they look a lot like a Styracosaurus and did I ever

see one of them? My own imminent personal demise aside,

I wish I could leave behind more world for her. I imagine

this sixth mass extinction will be old news, in her day,

and there will be a page in the newspaper (extinct, ca.

2027) next to the obituaries, where the daily losses are listed:

Arctic Sea Ice (“gone fishin’”); Blue-throated Macaw (“died

doing what they loved best”); Bali Tiger (“what a happy reunion

in heaven with cousins Snow Leopard and Caspian Tiger”);

Coral Reef (“after a lingering illness”). She and her friends

will adapt, of course. No one does adaptation like the humans:

virtual reality games with ninja sage-grouse fighting it out

on the lek; animatronic golden-cheeked warblers

greeting them from a simulated Ashe juniper in the yard.

And while I’m imagining and bemoaning, why not take

a hopeful turn here at the end of the poem in which my not-so-

distant great-grand will have a great-great down the line,

in some still-habitable corner of the planet, who picks through

the Anthropocene layer for  a living and comes across

the badly-postured bones of what they will believe to be

the last living poet to escape the 21^st-century purge, found

curled atop the one comfortable chair at a coffee shop,

cradling his laptop, only fragments of his last poem

recoverable, the scholars not surprised to find the words

liminal and luminous among the detritus, though the line

her smile was toothy as a Brazilian merganser sends them

scrambling to the luminescent Google Cloud, leaves them

smiling and nodding to each other like a polite audience

(extinct, ca. 2019) at a poetry reading.

(previously published in New Madrid Journal, 2017)

Lifting Weights

Over the past year or so, I have lost the weight

of a grandchild or a microwave, five bowling

balls or housecats, or a large bag of sugar.

The sugar is perhaps most apt, given that

most of the extra weight I had been carrying

around all those years could be distilled

into a (large) powdered pile of sugar and a soupçon

(or so) of rendered bacon fat. I can see your eyes

going glassy already, so let me assure you

this will not be a poetic memoir about my

struggle—some might call it heroic—to pull

myself back from the brink, wrestle that obese

monkey from my back. Nor will it be my thirty-

point plan which I will then sanctimoniously

advise you to follow if you know what’s good

for you, no sestina version of Sweatin’ to the Oldies.

People like hearing about how you lost weight

the same way they want to hear how your dreams

have become more vivid since menopause. No,

this feels like part of a more general plan—

though entirely unplanned—to pare down, un-

load, hold an estate sale before the fact, reduce

my life to its lowest common denominator.

I’m letting the books go, the CDs, taking boxes

of XXLs to Goodwill, eBaying the Pez dispenser

collection; everything must go. I’m saying no,

I’m scrivening, “I would prefer not to” on RSVPs,

I’m truant, AWOL, gone missing. This is not,

though, as far as I know, that pre-demise sloughing-

off, putting post-it notes on my cherry wood

highboy so the relations won’t squabble over it.

This is me sitting in the woods beneath

a Douglas Fir, next to a stream so clear I can see

trout leaning into the current, on the other side

of which a doe comes leading her young fawn

into a clearing, sees the stream and the tree, and,

seeing me, sees nothing that shouldn’t be there.

(published in Frontier Poetry, 2017)

Come-bye

I feel compelled, as I leave the coffee shop,

to push chairs in to their tables and straighten

newspapers into neat stacks. Easy enough.

The leaves in the stand of oak trees

in my backyard are raked into a bag almost

as soon as they fall, leaving only clean earth

between trunks. As far as compulsions go,

it seems harmless enough. At night, I sit

on the edge of my bed and tick through each

of my children and grandchildren, holding them

one at a time in my thoughts, thoroughly

scanning each one, combing through their lives

the way I comb though the long hair along

the forearms of my Australian Shepherd

after our walks, looking for stickseed and burs

that need cutting out. The dog puts his nose

through the fences surrounding the pastures

and animal pens we pass as we walk,

and I can see it twitch, see his eyes dart back

and forth as he accounts for each animal,

his legs quivering as the pull of instinct tells him

those sheep should be formed up, those free-

range chickens enjoy entirely too much

freedom, and he looks up at me as if to say,

can’t you see it? just give the order and I’ll

have things ship-shape in no time. And of course

I can see it, understand his need to herd, but these

are not ours, I tell him, and we move on,

ignoring the free-range world flickering

on the periphery, unfollowing Facebook friends,

unsubscribing from newspapers, walking

quickly around human humps and their middens

downtown, working, instead, to organize

the spice rack alphabetically, moving at a good clip

through cast and bring and cross-drive, until cardamom

sheds safely in its place next to cinnamon. 

(originally published in Frontier Poetry, 2017)

Mud Work

A wild tom watches us from the top

of the wooden fence, a ruff of hair around

his neck like James Dean with his leather

collar turned up, looking like he wants

to cut me but settling for the disrespect

of an extended yawn. It’s a sloppy

morning, early March, mud bubbling up

around the last patches of snow, and I

suspect the cat took to the fence line

to keep his feet dry. My granddaughter

and I, however, have work to do

in the mud, and cannot afford such

squeamishness. Bill Nye, the guinea pig,

after a fitful night during which we sat

vigil, gave up the ghost just before dawn,

lay in state, briefly, during breakfast,

in his sock-lined Crocs box, and now young

Clara looks for the perfect spot

in which to plant his remains. She hasn’t

discussed her views on heaven, with me,

and does not request that prayers

be prayed over his white-and-tan form,

nor over the final resting place she chooses

under the birch tree where we have often

watched brilliant goldfinches and nuthatches

hanging upside down from its branches,

and where now we root in the dark soil

at its base. My eye on the cat hunched

on the fencepost like a raven, I tell her

we will need to dig deeply if we hope

to keep good Bill from a premature

great gettin’ up morning, and she sets

to the work like a fervent acolyte, or

like a kid up to her elbows in mud.

(from MockingHeart Review, 2017)

Screw Your Courage

King: Indeed, I’m nothing if not brave.
Fool: In truth thou speaketh, nothing.
King: I am of two minds about that comma.
Fool: Pray, pay it, sirrah, as is your custom, no mind.

                                                            —The Fall of Fresno

It goes without saying that when we hear

the bomb blast, I will not be running towards

it with the heroes. Nor will I step in front

of you to take a bullet. Sorry. And in a thousand

smaller ways, I have long ago proven the true

measure of this man. As you well know,

I will leave one milliliter of milk in the carton,

so as not to be the one tasked with throwing it

out. I will snore a little louder when we both

hear the dog whining to be let out too early

in the morning. When we are watching

your favorite show about the bachelor who

test-drives a showroom full of well-equipped

women, you never hear the caustic dialogue

running through my head, only the occasional,

passive-aggressive, “I’ll bet she would go

to the kitchen and get him a beer.” It goes

without saying that the kids come to me

with their requests for later curfews and greater

allowances, knowing I will fold like a cheap suit.

So when I tell you I wish I could take your place

in that hospital bed, tubes snaking in and out

of you, wish it could be you telling me the lame

joke about Death going into a bar and the bartender

says, “what’ll you have?” and Death says, “the guy

on the third barstool”—we both know it has nothing

to do with self-sacrifice or a greater tolerance

for pain, and everything to do with going first,

with not being the one left holding the bag

of all the days to come, left to die a thousand times.

(from MockingHeart Review, 2017)