Branches down
everywhere the next
morning. A cool breeze
beckons. No more bellowing,
what billows will not break.
It figures strangers
would cut such familiar
figures on the shadowy trail.

That the figure
of a wild-eyed ancient
woman would appear
in the wound
of the shaken
tree on the other side of the hill.

Do you have any eights
that might gesture toward infinity
if you turn the card sideways?

The games we played
as we straddled so many
centuries. Strangers

clocking in so many
check-for-ticks
kind of days. Forty years

ago we met on a hot
Connecticut night
under a new wave moon.

Music blaring
from a boombox.
No bluffing necessary.

Fantastical stories
scribbled into a notebook.
Separating fact from

hallucination

was easier then.
The trees shuddered
when they asked:

Where were you

when they cut the deck
in half to expose
the Earth’s past climate?

Or sick. Panting.
Struggling. Failure
to stand. Alone.
Abandoned? A distance
from a gaggle
of geese in all sizes
(intermixed with a flock
of drakes) that communes
on the south side
of the garden
of the seasons.
A hard knot
in my throat
I can’t swallow.
I find two park-keepers
conversing on the community
arts center steps.
I struggle
to describe the location.
The north arm
of the lake?
One offers.
Near the tennis courts.
We’ll take care of it.
The end
of suffering.
I don’t linger
to see how.
I’ve completely forgotten
about the turtle
peering from its shell
at passing runners
and pedestrians
along Lake of the Isles.
This urban wildlife—
this merciful early June.

No stethoscope will help you
detect my grief. Carefully packed into
38 years and a day to measure
a deeply buried stolen blue

rhythm. Nothing borrowed,
no return to sender. Smoke
from Canadian wildfires
finally clears.

Her face appears
for a mere moment
each time I climb, reluctantly,
into a car. Then she’s gone.

A 22-year-old
voice I can’t hear
above the chainsaw buzzing
through a bright morning.

I understand clearing the lot
to make room to shelter
those in need. Still,
it breaks my heart

to expose that residual green
pulse of life in the elastic
branch that refuses
to be cracked.

A row of magnolia trees
brings aromatic shade
to the trail.
Suddenly, everything

in bloom. Her

laughter muffled,

then gone—

again.

We were soda jerks
for a night
that lasted all the next
year. And we called it
sinkhole tourism.

First, forsythia in the sculpture garden.
The arbor ready to be entwined.

“How does it feel to be
the tail end of what’s real?”

Written in bright purple
chalk beneath the shadow layer.

Then, tiny green buds
on maples, patches

of Siberian squill appear
out of nowhere in the grass.

“Did you hitch your wagon
to the wrong horse, or

your horse to the wrong wagon?”
Scratched in the glass

with a crude knife.
Sargent cherry trees

in the Peace Grove
along the park’s southeast

entrance trail suddenly shout
“Spring!” Your entrance. Your future

colonnade tosses you
down the hill. Throw another

robot conductor off a bridge
into a Minnesota lake.

Blink,

and another shoulder
season evaporates

into gasping for breath
in stagnant air.

Try to ignore
the used syringe

and stray chicken
bone in the street

beside a higher
than needed curb.

Watch your step.
Every straw and pencil wedged

in the gap between
sidewalk slabs triggers a fear

of needles, a fear
of addiction, a fear of slipping

inside the city’s
stormwater underbelly

where a hidden creek is dying
to get out. “Did she

try to possess you too?”
Spray paint on a concrete

tunnel wall. A mist

puts a smile on your face
as it fills the night

with an early May mood.
No thunder or sacred

branches cracking apart
will spoil it.

this train might derail
into a simmering chain
of thought. This anniversary
of a hootenanny so far up north
and deep in the middle

reminds her it’s his birthday:
her one and only husband.
They married at six,

divorced at seven.
Here’s to counting missed beats
that never got a chance
to channel the rhythm
of the waves

on the rocky beach.
He’ll never read this line,
or the next, or the ones

she wrote about a library bar.
Itinerant troublemakers
and other verse spewing
vagabonds flip through volumes
of poetry and lookbooks

on the table. Angels
on the ceiling. Drained
shot glasses strewn across

the cork floor
beside blacked-out tarts.
Stacks of alcoholic palimpsests
to be cataloged, and no one
remembers how.

Library of Congress
or Dewey Decimal,
who decides? Mermaids

swim out too far.
Scaled tails made
in the makerspace
turn out not to be
waterproof.

Grey Goose or Belvedere.
To the Lighthouse or
The Sun Also Rises.

Who decides what goes
on the top shelf?
Why put anything so far
out of reach? Never mind
those borrowed nights

dancing at the Hippodrome.
London 1984. A collection
of New York City years checked

out before you would meet
down by the once dead river.
Cobwebs yoke the pines
to one another in a cove
she won’t easily forget.

The briny taste of the color
of wet slate lingers fine free
forever on her tongue.

labeled the “material world,
the abode of man.” Never mind

all the other
gender identities

out there. Never mind the eagles
flying over the ocean where eagle eye

corals dazzle
in all their glorious fluorescence

in the deep below. The raptorial limbs
of the orchid mantis.

Never mind Jesus Christ

lizards gathering momentum
to run across a stream.

The rubber tree and its scarred
trunk. Giant sequoias kiss

the flaming sky. An underwater cypress
forest teems with aquatic life.

The narwhal tests the water’s salinity

with its spiraling tooth.
Never mind the afternoon dance

of the telegraph plant or
the rootlessness of grandpa’s beard.

The sea angel licks the sea
butterfly to death in the abyss.

Emperor penguins in a huddle
on an Antarctic winter night.

Never mind African elephant
allomothers comforting calves

with their trunks.
The bowerbird paints the walls

of the starter house
he built for his mate

with charcoal dust
and spit. Never mind

those dwarf seahorses
as they hide in plain sight

with their prehensile tails
wrapped around gorgonian

hitching posts. They scan
the subtidal neighborhood

with panoramic vision.

Alaskan wood frogs lying immobile
and frozen and very much alive

in the earth. The Earth!
Our home. Please no more never mind.

I did not dream

I was a suitcase,
which did not fall
from an open window

and smash onto a nearby roof
into a thousand pieces.
Did you see all

those double letters
hang onto one another
for dear life as they rolled

along the creek
before it spilled ink-stained
sediment into every crook,

then slipped beneath
the street?
You did not dream

of me drinking strong
cups of coffee—
one after another—

before I did not see
it coming. The spell broken
by so many hot murmurings

of drought as rain melts
any remaining mounds
of dirty snow. Not the brown kind

that fell along the North Shore.
Not heaps of dust vacuumed
from New Mexican sand dunes

by monstrous winds.
Not plumes
of molten rock.

I did not drive
the white car
that you did not crash

into a Kentucky library.
And that glass wall:
it did not shatter.

Isn’t this what it means
to be human? The puppeteer
scratching her head

as mechatronic marionettes
rush the stage to dance
on wildly warped boards.

We did not carry
our portmanteaus
into the motel

camouflaged by night smog.
The wood did not burn,
the neon sign did not flicker,

and the clock did not strike at all.

They flip each other



the bird



as a sweet nod to their mutual affection.
Naturally. She swears

she saw a black and yellow butterfly
wing on the dirty

snow-encrusted trail weeks before
the chain of lakes ice out.

The nest fell after 20 years.
The eaglet did not



survive.



Hopping from one live
cam to the next,

she watches two peregrines
fuss over their first egg.

Does she dare
hope? Will he see

one fly upside down again?
When will the ruby-throated

hummingbirds awaken
from their torpor and



return




to mesmerize them
with their backwards

in-flight dance?
Just a 3-second fling

we all know so well.
And ducks contemplate

a swim in a freshly melted city
park puddle before seeking seasonal

monogamy. Back
in the blind, they



coo



obscenities at one another
as they share

binoculars on the warmest day
in five months.