poet, interviewer, musician, traveler
Nurture
He was so small.
I threw him onto the bed, then
remembered the smack
of a fist against my jaw.
I looked at my own hands,
horrified.
/ / /
4 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 14 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentIn The Driveway In The Tucson Foothills There Were
a series of stones arranged in a semicircle
eight or so chairs, in two groups,
with white ribbon to create an aisle
eight or so people, most of whom were related
to one or the other of the celebrants,
plus Dave and Priscilla
some low cacti, which would come into play
after the ceremony when the bride
stepped out of the stone semicircle
and straight into the sharp spines
a CD boombox, probably the groom’s,
playing a Nat King Cole Trio CD,
definitely the groom’s
a justice of the peace in a dark suit,
with glasses and a mustache, who
turned out to take only cash,
causing the best man to ask the groom’s
grandfather if he had any on him,
which, thankfully, he did
two young people who barely knew
what they were doing, who could not see
that it wouldn’t last, who stood in the
semicircle of stones and hoped
that would be enough
/ / /
3 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 13 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentParamnesia
There was a story that,
going around a corner,
the passenger door
of my uncle’s red
Mustang convertible
flew open,
and my cousin,
who was not
wearing a seat belt,
tumbled out of the car,
only to grab on
to the seat belt
he hadn’t been wearing
to stop himself
being hurled
to the pavement,
but I now think
I made this up.
/ / /
2 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 12 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentSanctuary
The interior of the church is dimly lit.
It’s a weekday afternoon, so the building
is empty, except for two people.
One is a teenage boy.
He has glasses too big for his face,
and the same haircut he’s had since he was five.
He’s wearing clothes chosen by his mother.
The other person is an older woman.
Honestly, she’s probably in her forties,
but that’s old to him.
He is crying.
In those days it was hard for him to cry.
Not because he didn’t have reason.
She has one arm around his shoulders,
there in the front pew.
The sanctuary smells faintly of incense,
a scent that never truly leaves.
Sanctuary. In earlier days the door of a church
was a shield from persecution.
The boy isn’t running from the law, though.
He’s trying to come to grips with abuse
and undiagnosed depression and a total lack
of any means of escape.
Beyond the heavy door is the heavier town.
He asked to be sent away to boarding school,
but his parents said no.
There’s nothing she can do, really,
but tell him it’ll be okay.
She’s wrong, but at least she says it.
/ / /
1 August 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 11 in a series called 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentHost Dad
I had never seen anyone stretch before.
Deep knee bends and rotations of the arms.
Folding at the waist and swinging side to side.
Each afternoon, as I hop down to the sidewalk
from the low wall in front of the station,
as I feel the delightful pull in my thigh muscles,
I think of his morning stretches.
/ / /
31 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 10 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentCalls
On the weekends my grandma made her calls.
She called the daughters and the nieces
and, in earlier years, the brothers or their wives.
She collected the latest news and gossip,
spreading it from call to call like a
carefully coifed version of the internet.
The calls were strong thread, knitting together
a small and far-flung family that had once
shared Sunday dinners in Lenox, and birthdays,
and holidays, but now mostly shared cards.
The women she used to call
are now grandmothers themselves,
and they talk on the weekends still.
I make my calls, too, to my sons
and my sister, and to cousins and aunts,
and to the found family I’ve gathered
during this strange life.
“One of these days,” my first therapist said,
“you’ll have to let go of Lenox.”
Maybe, but not today.
/ / /
30 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 9 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentMarge
My “lunch lady” voice is, to some degree, channeling her.
Other than FDR, and Burgess Meredith as the Penguin,
she was the only person I ever saw using a cigarette holder.
I remember her with a perm, with deep crinkles around her eyes,
and with oversized glasses on a chain around her neck.
(Uncle Jack would be in the next room,
monitoring the local first responders on his scanner.
In his younger days he’d wake the kids when the fire bell rang,
and they’d all rush off in pajamas and jackets to see the fire.)
She was a housekeeper at a swanky resort
in the swanky town our non-swanky family called home.
And that’s it, really. She worked and married (twice)
and raised kids and had thoughts and feelings and dreams,
but to me she’s a brief series of half-remembered sketches,
as I will be someday to people I can’t yet imagine meeting.
/ / /
29 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 8 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentOur Bodies, Ourselves
I came back from a week in Plymouth,
where my grandparents had been plying me
with Ring Dings and unlimited TV.
I got out of their car and saw
the look of horror on my mom’s face.
Every night for weeks she made me
jog around our neighborhood
to lose the weight I’d gained on the trip.
I was six, maybe seven, years old.
I finished lunch before writing this.
I logged every calorie into an app.
In six weeks I’ll be 50.
It never goes away.
/ / /
28 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem 7 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentNo Ice Cream
I am walking on a sidewalk
down a hill
toward an ice cream shop
that has a wall of glass brick.
I am holding the hand of a woman
whose face I can’t see.
I am very little.
My arm is upraised
because we are holding hands,
as if I’m asking to be noticed.
When we arrive at the ice cream shop,
the glass brick fills my field of vision.
It is both mundane and magical,
like the wall of a ruined castle.
This memory contains no ice cream.
After years of tests and probes,
it turned out it wasn’t the dairy
that was the problem.
/ / /
24 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem #3 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
Leave a CommentCharles Street
That’s me at the door, crying,
watching my mom and her boyfriend
walk across the street to the car.
Maybe I didn’t understand
that she’d be coming back.
Or maybe I understood
that she wouldn’t be.
/ / /
23 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem #2 in a new series,
50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing
a poem a day between now and my
50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus
on memories of my past, and the people
who inhabited it.
Watching The Golf
I have the golf on in the background.
This is a very surprising way
for me to begin a poem.
I am not, by nature, a fan.
But the sounds remind me of my grandpa,
who liked nothing better
than to watch the golf
on a weekend afternoon.
Even then, as a kid,
I remember thinking it was boring.
Calming, in its way,
but odd to watch on TV.
He used to play, my grandpa.
He and his friends used to spend
weekends dressed in argyle and knickers,
walking around the manicured courses
of western Massachusetts.
In the few photos I’ve seen
they look very happy.
My grandpa stopped golfing
as a younger man. Maybe my age now.
Which is odd, come to think of it.
During his retirement,
when he had all that free time,
he stopped using it for a thing he loved.
Instead he tuned in and listened
to the whispering men.
My grandpa was a quiet man.
But in those photos he looks different.
He looks like he might have been a man
who liked to laugh, liked to tell jokes,
liked to throw an arm around the shoulders
of another man in knickers.
I think about my grandpa a lot.
About what he knew. And when.
And about why he kept on, and why
he stopped.
/ / /
22 July 2023
Charlottesville VA
This is poem #1 in a new series,
50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing
a poem a day between now and my
50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus
on memories of my past, and the people
who inhabited it.
Swedish fish
I bought Swedish fish at Wegmans.
Do people still call them that?
The little gummy fish.
Mine are red but they come in other colors.
When I was a kid, my dad would take me
to a little mom-and-pop candy shop.
We’d buy a bag of fish, then go home
to watch the Saturday afternoon monster movie.
Sometimes it would be a classic:
Dracula, The Wolfman, Frankenstein.
More often it was giant irradiated bugs
or a disembodied hand or aliens
who looked goofy even in the 70s.
If I’m honest, I bought the fish tonight
because I miss having parents, but
Swedish fish are no replacement
for a mom and dad.
/ / /
31 May 2023
Charlottesville VA
As the storm starts I press play on the Dave Brubeck album and think of my grandpa. When I was a kid he had a record by the Jack Stewart Quartet, playing Brubeck tunes. They were a band from the Berkshires, where he and I are also from. Half the album was recorded live at a private girls’ school, the other half … I can’t quite recall. Long before I heard the Brubeck originals, I heard these local reproductions, which had the odd effect of making Brubeck seem like the copycat.
thunder drowns the piano
rain on the glass like snares
turntable memories of spring
/ / /
22 April 2023
Charlottesville VA
The end of the line
We crossed this border so many times,
going to visit your family
or returning to our own.
Rather than a river of rapids and rocks,
our crossing was an imaginary line, a sign
sped past at 75 miles per hour.
With this poem I’m erecting a new sign,
painting a fresh imaginary line.
This time I’ll be the only one crossing it.
Across this border is the rest of my life,
all the other poems I’ll write,
all the other places I’ll go.
No more words about you,
no more places seen together.
The clouds will drift over the hills
and I’ll go with them.
/ / /
16 June 2022
Pittsfield MA
