The Disappeared
Skeletal vets of Amiens in grimy suits —
bent, waiting for the M2.
Pub drunk from noon on
having spent their Kaiser tales
on gin.

Milk men in fiddler’s caps,
pre-dawn clattering glass.
Masters of every back porch and alley
with cream, butter, bloodshot eyes
and blocks of ice
dripping.

Hitchhikers watching for,
listening for, engines of change.
Brooding on brutal fathers
and sexual shame.
Stones cutting through soles.
Facing east to go
west.

Black clad nonnas from Genoa,
Professors in pipe clouds with wild eyebrows,
Children hiding in the woods from mothers and chores,
Confessionalists with heads in the forge.
All your wounded icons
finding their
final.

It’s there where all farewells began.

Cockeyed Smile
An overlong rite of spring,
young crowds gathered in quarries and fallows,
bonfires reflected in stainless beer barrels tapped
on the barb of a waxing moon cooled
by chilled laughter crushed glass strums
the din of eight tracks.

Sprawl forward and embrace
bop bass lines parsed and praised
with clumsy passion debating
Kant in the foggiest terms fed
by the cheapest sweet wine based
on the faintest insight.

Trays crash in the back of the tavern
but we each need one more round
s’il vous plait to bury the day bathe
it in a trace of meaning curse
the rotten pay hope
for love of some kind.

Pour until the ice lifts
and your eye lids drape.
Your children call to each other across the lake swim
one last for the day hear
that thrum of crickets that snake hiss
of melting cubes.

An old gent alone keeps
his rye warm and neat each evening recollects
a buoyant trance, brief joys,
a gentle friend with a cockeyed smile,
through the frosted pane sees
this moon wane.

Page Avenue
The complaints of jays and crows.
The smell of damp ivy and clay
wrapped in deep oak shade.

The house sits high on a plinth
of moss and failed sod.

In each eye yellowed blinds
pinch stippled light
cheek to sill,
bolted shut.

Beneath: A cellar
dark in varnished pine.
Above: the attic’s gothic angles
rank with raw lumber.

Between: an aged he and she
roost on branches room to room —
a carpet-dampened hush
on cool tobacco clouds.

Hardly a word unmuzzled,
barely a tick but for the brass clock.
He in petulant sheen.
She, heron still.

At every quarter hour ring
the notes, the downward count,
the whistled wind
through gritting teeth.

Complaining crows and jays
Tick the days away.