Harbor in December

The dark machine shop—silent, sealed, and still.

The gray horizon barren of its ships.

The sky devoid of tackle’s tangled spires.

The vacant wharves and docks, the empty slips.

The water undisturbed but by the wind.

No halyard's clang or buzz of whirring lines.

The blackness interrupted only by

Some buoys and a tavern’s neon signs.

Yet nothing quite completely put away,

As if it might be needed yet today.

Sweet, small resistance to the sweep of fate:

The things we wait for; and the things that wait.

I Wonder On the Beggars' Lonely Art

I wonder on the beggars’ lonely art

That shapes the words they hold to face the road;

The studied text selected to impart

The grace implored, the suffering bestowed.

The veteran. The homeless. Unemployed.

The bus fare. Just one ticket for the line.

The cars pass by, the eyes turn to avoid

The eyes that seek them out, the cup, the sign.

I would they did not know the vanity

Of words that paint humanity as one,

The fruitlessness of the deep heart’s soft plea:
I once was someone's child, a mother's son.

I Thought I Saw John Keats Last Night

I thought I saw John Keats last night.

I can’t be sure. We’ve never met.

Half-lit beneath the streetlamp’s light,

his cough was deep and rough and wet.

He had his collar pulled up high.

He shuddered in the misting rain.

I saw his breath. A prayer. A sigh. 

Some music from his teeming brain.

The bookie rushed past to the store.

The music pounded from the car.

The girl ran toward the open door.

A fight called from the corner bar.

The memories that crowd me out.

The one who sobbed and grieved and died.

Indulgences of rage and doubt.

Confessions little, lost, and lied.

I thought I saw John Keats last night.

I can’t be sure. We’ve never met.

Perhaps he went to watch the fight.

Or see the girl. Or pay a debt.
His face was soaked with rain and sweat.

I thought I saw John Keats last night.
The passing phantoms swallowed him.
His eyes were damp and dark and dim.
I caught them in the streetlamp's light.
Time out of joint then put to right.
Intruding vision, set to flight.

Amos

“Do two walk together, unless they have agreed to do so?”

His name was Amos and his blackness stood

against the sky like ash upon a sheet.

I watched him as he wrestled out the shapes

to carve a garden from the cluttered beds.

His clothing never changed: the patterned shirt,

stained overalls, the brown boots cracked like skin.

His knobby hands, his bowed knees, walking slow,

the silence of his pain when bending down.

My mother sent me out to help him work.

She warned me I should not get in his way.

St. Louis, ’62, a fierce July.

The molten air sat hard on everyone.

I wanted overalls like Amos had.

My mother said “You’ll melt!” and gave me shorts.

So every day I breathed him as he worked,

the sweat that stained his clothes and ringed his hat.

A sweat of okra, lard, and greens and pork,

exotic to me as his phlegmy laugh.

My child’s hands could scarcely grasp the tools.

He shared his jar of water even so.

Any icy jar he kept tucked in the shade.

It sweated, too: slim rivulets of tears.

There were so many things we did not know:

The loss to come, my father gone, the grief.

How we were tilling gardens for the ones

Who’d take this house, strangers, the waiting ghosts.

We did not know; and so we simply worked.

Two diggers, side by side, our fingers caked.

*

At sixty, I come in from cutting wood,

a final try to save a dying birch.

Tonight the rain will come; the air is thick.

My knees betray the storm across the lake.

I fill a mason jar and take a drink.

A long, slow draw. And there he is again.

A memory made fresh, a phantom limb.  

My nostrils filling with his strong, sweet scent.

In the Garden

“Do two walk together, unless they have agreed to do so?”

His name was Amos and he was the blackest man I’d ever seen.

My parents hired him to resurrect the wild tangle of our backyard into a garden.

Every day he wore the same clothes: floppy hat, patterned shirt, stained overalls, brown boots cracked like the skin of his fingers.

He had knobby hands and bowed knees and he walked bent.

He never made a sound when he knelt or stood, though I could tell it hurt.

My mother sent me out to help Amos, warning me that I should not bother him, which I did not understand.

It was the summer of 1962 in St. Louis, Missouri and the molten air sat heavily on everything and everyone.

I asked my mother for overalls like Amos had and she said no.

Every day, Amos sweated through his clothing and I breathed his work in and out of my lungs as I toiled next to him, my five-year-old hands barely able to hold the tools.

His sweat had notes of okra, lard, and pork, like nothing in our home.

While we dug in the garden we shared a luxury: a mason jar of ice water sitting in the shade.

All the things we did not know: that my family would lose everything—the house, the shiny sedan in the driveway, the gardens we tilled for whoever would live here next.

The shedding, the loss to come.

All the things we did not know.

Amos said little to me and I said less to him.

We just worked.

*

At sixty, I come in from a morning running the big saw in our orchard yard in Northern Michigan, cutting hollowed branches from a birch tree to see if I can save it, tilting at the inevitability of its imminent death.

Tonight it will rain and break the terrible heat that drenched my labors.

I fill a mason jar with water and ice and take a long, slow draw from it.

And here I am, half a century later—

memory made flesh,

phantom limb,

my nostrils filling again with his strong, sweet scent.